In this sequel, the faces have changed, but the plot is the same.

The School Committee meeting room in the Education Center was packed Monday night—people were even standing in the halls—as the city grapples with another budget season mired in a seemingly endless school funding crisis whose flames have been fanned by inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic.

People spoke about their anger, their fear and their expectation that a new mayor will find a way to fund Superintendent Anna Nolin’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request.

“The community cares about this,” Amelia Oliver said. “This is an untenable situation. Please fund a level-services budget for our school district.”

With a roughly $2.7 million gap between her request and Mayor Marc Laredo’s announced $314.6 million NPS allocation, Nolin has recommended more than a million dollars in staff cuts and other means to help save the district’s new Middle School Math Mandate:

• $235,000 from the Newton Early Childhood Program Tuition Account
• $150,000 from the Food Service Account
• $185,000 from eliminating 1.85 full-time English Language Learner teacher positions
• $322,000 from eliminating two teachers and one administrative position from Newton North High School
• $151,029 in reductions to the district’s substitute teacher budget.

Nolin is also willing to eliminate the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion director and sustainability director positions to shrink the FY2027 gap.

And that’s just a small sampling. Here’s a full slideshow of all the potential cuts.

The massive crowd that showed up Monday wasn’t having any of it.

In her plea for a level-services budget (where services stay the same as the previous year), Oliver focused on the DEI director position and what she felt would be the impact of its absence.

The role was created in 2020 by former Superintendent David Fleischman, she noted, to address a issues around diversity and inclusion in various aspects of school operations.

“There are people who have moved to Newton because we have a director of DEI, because the district says we care enough about this to pay for someone to prioritize this and do the work and be accountable,” Oliver said.

Amani Arunga, who’s attended all 13 years of her education in NPS and has served as president of Newton North High School for the past four years, said she has seen directly the lack of diversity in NPS faculty.

“I have had one black classroom teacher,” Arunga said. “Out of the seven advanced placement courses that I have taken, I have been either the only or one of two black students, a statistic that is not reflective of the diversity in our school system.”

Jenna Miara, mom of two kids in the NPS system who ran for School Committee last year, praised the new mayor’s “accurate-based budget” and “more collegial” process but said that doesn’t offset the budget gap.

“While the reasons may be different, once again this year, the allocation is significantly less than what is needed to merely maintain level service, much less make progress toward the urgent goals in NPS strategic plan,” Miara said. “Mayor Laredo, I was glad to hear you say at an earlier meeting that the city would step up if NPS faced a true emergency. I submit to you that this funding gap, driven by inflationary costs that are almost entirely out of the district’s control, is a true emergency.”

Ward 4 School Committee member Tamika Olszewski thanked the crowd for raising their concerns about the cuts.

“I also want to say that I’m very ashamed of us as a governing body for not forcing that conversation earlier,” Olszewski said. “The very moment when these proposed reductions were put before us, our question to the superintendent should have been, ‘What is your plan for absorbing the loss of these positions? How are we as a district going to ferry the erosion of, as some of our commenters spoke about, the provision of service?’ We didn’t do that job.”

Laredo emphasized that talks are still ongoing and that his administration’s focus on future stability remains a priority. He said he’ll be sitting down with the School Committee and superintendent as early as this summer to get started on Fiscal Year 2028.

“We are not going to come up with one-time free cash allocations after low balling a budget,” Laredo said. “I don’t think that’s the right way to go. At the same time, we do have to be cognizant of our fiscal reality. We don’t get to just unilaterally raise taxes for people. The School Committee, as all of us know, does not have the ability just to propose a school tax.”

The mayor, however, can propose a Proposition 2 ½ override (a mechanism for voters to bypass state law and raise the overall tax levy more than 2.5 percent over the previous year), but Laredo has not proposed that for this coming budget. 

With health insurance and other costs rising far faster than the rate of inflation and given Newton’s slow revenue growth, former Mayor Ruthanne Fuller said the city would likely need a Proposition 2 ½ override in the next few years, and Laredo has not ruled that option out as a last resort in the future.

“I appreciate the heartfelt concern about particular cuts, and I recognize, and I think the superintendent recognizes as well, these are not easy,” Laredo said. “In a perfect world, you would not have to do any of them. But again, we don’t live in a perfect world.”