Waltham School District Left Scrambling For $3 Million After Surprise News

WALTHAM, MA — The Waltham School Superintendent, School Committee and the Mayor were taken by surprise by a plan to add 60 homeless families to the Home Suites Inn just in time for school next year. The school officials only found out about the plan through a rumor - and only after the budget for the next school year had been finished.

Home Suites Inn has partially served as a shelter for homeless families since 2009 and it is one of the larger in the areas. Last year there were no new families or students added to the shelter, said the superintendent. Between that and a recent profession from the governor saying that the state would move away from sending families experiencing homelessness to hotels in favor of a more permanent setting, the news especially took the district by surprise.

The superintendent said that a school employee only happened upon the information and the district reached out first to confirm the news with the Middlesex Human Services Agency. This made for some frustrated officials.

"Had we been part of this planning process when the proposal was being discussed we might have been able to inform and plan in a way that as more strategic and thoughtful," said Superintendent Drew Echelson in an interview.

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The addition of that many potential students - an estimate of 2 per family would add an estimated $3 million cost to the school budget, mostly in transportation fees, and would add more pressure to the already crowded schools, he said.

The School Committee met for the first time with Middlesex Human Services Agency officials at their most recent meeting on Wednesday, June 21 and expressed their concerns and frustration with the plan as they learned more about what it might look like.

Echelson said the plan didn't exactly align with the trend they had been seeing, a decrease in homeless families at hotels and the governor's statement on it.

In the meeting, a representative from the agency said 25 families are already living in the building, and that only 60 new families would be moving in.

But with each family potentially bringing in two school age children and as many as 170 students needing to find transportation to school and resources to go along with that, said Echelson, it would be a strain on the district.

Still, Echelson estimated that 50 percent of the students would attend Waltham schools, while the other half would likely attend schools in the districts where they attended prior to going homeless. And the district was required by law to help get them there making transporting the out-of-district students be the biggest cost to the Waltham school system followed by adding new positions to handle the some 60 new students.

All of this comes as the district is looking to not only expand the space at the high school but also considering adding a new K-8 in the district. "And one of our two middle schools is nearing capacity," he said.

Still, the superintendent said he asked that the Middlesex Human Services Agency officials would sit down with him and discuss it more thoroughly.

In the meantime?

"We're writing to state delegation to communicate some of the concerns and see what offset costs might be made available to the school department to close the budget gap," he said.

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EDITORS NOTE: The Middlesex Human Services Agency shares an acronym with the Boston based Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance but they are different organizations. An earlier version of this article incorrectly labeled the organization with whom the school officials expressed frustrations with recently. That organization is the Middlesex Human Services Agency.

Photo by Jenna Fisher/ Patch