Superintendent Anna Nolin uses five budget models for a guide—color-coded, ranging from a “cuts” budget with cuts shown in yellow to a “thrive” budget with everything funded and large investments made in new programming  shown in green.

The district isn’t getting anywhere near the green this school year, due to a variety of fiscal budgetary factors and a federal government intent on cutting even more of the city’s funding. But after a lengthy, at times contentious, budget process this year, the superintendent was able to salvage many of the district’s staff and services.

So what’s new with NPS for the 2025-2026 academic year? It’s a mixed bag.

New hurdles

The Fiscal Year 2026 budget shortfall created a crisis for NPS, driven largely by rising cost of health care and slow revenue growth.

Nolin wanted a level-services-plus budget, which would have kept existing services and added a couple more. Mayor Ruthanne Fuller offered a school budget of a few million dollars less than Nolin’s request, and several weeks of negotiating followed. Eventually, a compromise was reached that would fund services with help from the NPS Stabilization Fund.

Cuts still came. But Nolin’s administration tried to leave classrooms intact, so cuts were made to support positions.

“We did delay the opening of two special education programs, one in the preschool and one in elementary schools,” Nolin said. “The problem is kids age in at 3 to come in, and we know these kids are on our rolls, and we kicked the can down the road to January to see what funding would be like.”

Making matters more stressful, the district received word that there would be cuts to Newton’s Title I, Title II and Title III funding (federal grants to help low-income students, provide professional development and support English language learning for students in immigrant families).

“And last night, we just got another notice that there may be additional cuts,” Nolin said.

Losing support for low-income and immigrant families—arguable among the most vulnerable students in the system—makes it difficult to address achievement gaps among those students, and the district was unable to implement much of its Multi-Tiered Levels of Support initiative to offset that impact.

“So while we were able through reorganization to put into place some supports in [grades] K to 5, we haven’t been able to add it at the middle school level,” Nolin explained. “So all of our middle schools, grades six through eight, do not have the level of support that I would recommend for students to address those achievement gaps.”

She noted that the district has cut support staff including math and literacy specialists for several years—largely in the high schools—and the plan was to restore them, but that will have to wait as well. And the district was also unable to expand its career and technical education shop offerings at both Newton North and Newton South.

“High school really took the lion’s share of the cuts, because you can’t cancel fourth grade,” she said. “But you can cancel additional periods of science electives. So it was easier to make cuts at the high school level, but now here we are with more population at the high schools and not everybody’s schedules are fully realized. So those are some real problems in the budget that we continue.”

Superintendent Anna Nolin listens to comments from members of the community at Brown Middle School on March 27, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

New opportunities

The 2025-2026 school year isn’t all about losses. There’s new stuff, too.

The district recently added a Family Engagement Center—a support system led by Christina Maryland, the central administration’s director of communication and family engagement.

And there’s a new attendance specialist, which the district hasn’t had in a while, to work with families of students with chronic attendance issues.

“We did an analysis this summer of who the students are who were not achieving at grade level and attendance, and there’s a high correlation between the two, which isn’t an earth-shattering idea, right? But it’s that we can correlate it based on our data,” Nolin said.

The district is also launching new math curriculum and math courses, which the School Committee will discuss in detail next week.

“We’re trying to define pathways for students and create a more rigorous math experience for everyone,”  Nolin said. “We’re very excited about that.”

Teachers are piloting different types of curricula to help craft the “math curriculum of the future,” Nolin added, and emphasized that she would not be implementing a one-size-fits-all generic lesson plan for teachers to follow.

“I was a longtime teacher. The joy of being a teacher is that you have your standards that you have to have kids master by the end of a unit. And then if your district’s doing what they should do, they give you some high quality resources from which teachers curate, how to match those resources to the kids to achieve the standards,” she said. “There’s no Roboteach, there’s no saying ‘It’s Thursday so we’re on page five.’ But our teachers deserve high-quality resources to teach with. And right now, they spend a lot of time running around, creating them, working for them, spending their own money.”

Teachers throughout the district are undergoing a lot of professional development this year in hopes of accelerating student learning, with help from a congressional earmark aimed at training educators for the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support initiative (for what the school has managed to implement and for the parts yet to come).

And Free Cash disbursements from the city have allowed NPS to purchase things like additional science class materials.

The district has three new elementary school principals—Dr. Simone Kotraba at Burr, Jamie Yadoff at Memorial-Spalding, Kate O’Leary at Zervas—replacing the three who retired in June.

And there’s new curriculum leadership at the central office.

“We reorganized, which allowed us to save some funding, but also to streamline who was in charge of what, and we brought in some real curriculum experts,” Nolin said. “Much of what we need to accomplish now is in the curriculum realm and design of our curriculum, so our expert teachers can do what they do best.”

New resolve

Part of the deal reached between school administration and the mayor involves use of the NPS Stabilization Fund, set up during the teacher strike last year to help fill budget gaps when needed.

Nolin will have to go to the City Council and advocate for those funds to be released as needs arise this year, which is a path typically not required of superintendents outside of budget hearings.

“And I’m certainly hoping that people understand that if we’re going to enact, say, this new math program, while the mayor gave us an initial infusion of monies through free cash to purchase the stuff and to try to train teachers, if we want to put the kinds of supports in that are really going to make the math Pathways program work, we need to support it with the MTSS staff,” she said. “We can’t pretend like the teachers are going to be able to teach the new curriculum and remediate all the old things that happened without additional support.”

And while the district didn’t cut any social workers or arts programs, Nolin is worried about what the future holds for NPS at a time when budgeting is so chaotic.

“As we continue, if it continues to be cuts, cuts, cuts, we want to preserve the classroom, and we can’t cancel fourth grade,” she said. “So what goes on the block? Things that are ‘not required.’ And, I mean, I don’t know how a school system operates without mental health services these days, but technically, it could be seen as ‘extra.’ This community doesn’t see it that way. I don’t see it that way. And our teachers don’t see it that way, but I’m worried about it.”

And she stressed that she doesn’t want to see any more weight put on the shoulders of Newton’s educators than is already there.

“We don’t want any more burdens on our teachers,” she said. “Over the last 20 years, look at the burden on the average teacher, right? Families expect more from us. Society expects more from us. From technology education and mandates to health care to mental health and also all the academic pieces.”

Whatever the next year brings, Nolin will be facing it alongside a new mayor and a mostly new school committee, as Mayor Ruthanne Fuller and six out of eight committee members are not seeking reelection. That could reshape the budgeting game heading into budget season next spring.

Can Newton eventually get to Nolin’s green “thrive” budget?

“I think they must,” she said decisively with a smile. “It’s what kids need and deserve, and there’s a lot of discussion and pride in the schools here, and I think that in order to keep that pride strong and for kids to get what they need when they need it, we’re going to need to enact that budget.”