MARSHFIELD — The school committee approved a fiscal year 2027 budget proposal of $63.6 million, which would provide level services with a 5.57% increase over fiscal year 2026.
Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance Tom Miller described the budget proposal in a Jan. 13 School Committee meeting and said that several factors are driving a higher than usual increase for the coming year.
The school district projects a $78,000 increase in utilities costs, which Miller said might not be an aggressive enough estimate. It also projects a $100,000 increase each for athletics, technology maintenance and building maintenance just to maintain level services.
The greatest increase is $642,000 for out-of-district special education costs, including tuition and transportation for students who cannot be served in the district. These costs have been a major driver of operating budget increases across the South Shore.
The school budget in fiscal year 2026 was $60 million, a 4.57% increase from fiscal year 2025. Since 2022, the school department has received yearly increases of around 3%, which Miller said would be inadequate for fiscal year 2027 due to inflation and rising costs.
The Select Board will review the budget proposal along with other departments’ requests, and the town will present a final budget recommendation at town meeting in April, where it will be put to a vote. In the meantime, town and school officials will continue debating and negotiating about the budget.
Marshfield is facing an extreme deficit in fiscal year 2027: the town estimated that total revenue that year will increase by $1.86 million, while fixed expenses will go up $4.3 million, leaving the current deficit projection at $2.4 million. Select Board Chair Eric Kelley said in an interview that the deficit could reach $4.5 million or more.
Miller also said that the school district “barely closed out” fiscal year 2025 within budget and is dealing with “very thin” margins through fiscal year 2026.
Given the severity of the shortfall and the fact that the district’s enrollment has fallen by 400 students since fiscal year 2020, Kelley argued that the school department’s budget should not increase at all.
“There is no money to give,” he said. “I know that they have the same overhead costs, but when you have that number of students that have dropped off over the years, it appears they are not addressing it.”
Miller said that operating without any increase would be “impossible.” The correlation between budget and total enrollment is “small,” he said, and Marshfield Public Schools already have 25 fewer elementary classrooms than they had 17 years ago.
“We’re facing the same issues that every other town, every other school department is facing,” he said. “Everybody just keeps increasing their costs, and we can’t increase our costs with Proposition 2½. We’re stuck.”
Schools brace for potential layoffs
In a school committee meeting Dec. 2, Miller said that non-salary expenses have become a larger percentage of the budget because of inflation. That has forced the money appropriated for salaries to shrink: in the past two years, the district has pared back salary expenses by $1.64 million.
The district has not had to lay off any employees in that time, Miller said. But it did decline to fill 19.7 full- and part-time positions in the last two years after retirements, including teachers and therapists.
“Reducing these positions is not a trimming of fat exercise,” Superintendent Patrick Sullivan said in the Jan. 13 meeting. “All of these positions have a significant impact on our students, whether it's class sizes or it's the supports the students need.”
Kelley said that he believed the decreased personnel had little effect on students due to the enrollment drop, and that current budget projections make layoffs look “unavoidable.” Miller agreed that reductions were likely but emphasized that each layoff “is going to come with a cost.”
85% of the fiscal year 2027 school budget proposal is allocated to salary expenses. But three contract negotiations are still in progress, including negotiations for teacher contracts.
Questions raised over capital requests
To deal with the financial troubles to come in 2027, some departments are trying to transfer operating expenses to capital requests, said Capital Budget Committee Chair Jack Griffin and Town Accountant Meg LaMay in a Jan. 29 Select Board Meeting. Capital requests are supposed to fund one-time purchases of more than $25,000, and Griffin expressed concern that the school department was grouping together various items to meet that threshold.
In that meeting, Griffin said that the school department submitted a capital request of $616,000 for technology, but that the capital budget committee believed only one item in the capital request “clearly qualified as a capital asset.”
“In my experience through many prior years on capital budget, the only thing that was ever asked for in technology was the Chromebooks,” Griffin said. “And this year you've got all these items in there, so it definitely looks like it's something that they want to get out of the school budget and put on our side.”
Municipal budget growth outpaces schools
Miller said that over the last 17 years, the town’s total municipal budget has increased by an average of 5.53% per year, while the education budget has increased by an average of 3.25% per year, a rate he said was “not sustainable.”
A document shared by Miller tracking budget increases since 2009 confirmed those numbers. The document also showed that the education budget grew by 49% in that time period while the municipal budget grew by 83%. (The municipal budget in that document does not include fire, police and public works budgets, which grew by 73%, 120%, and 76%, respectively.)
“In a time where other neighboring communities are continuing to see the share of their budget in town increase for how much they spend on public education, Marshfield is going down,” he said Dec. 2.
When the South Shore Times asked Kelley if he could corroborate the claim that the school’s share of the town’s total operating budget has decreased, Kelley said that “that would be news to me.”
The document also showed that the municipal budget increased by a greater percentage than the school budget in 10 out of the last 17 years. The last time that the school budget increased by a greater percentage than the municipal budget was 2022.
Miller called the town’s budgeting over the past few years “very aggressive” and bemoaned a lack of “equitable revenue sharing,” based on the municipal side of the budget growing more than the school side.
“We reduced over ten positions last year, and townside added a position,” he said. “Last year, schools received the largest increase since I've been here, 4.4%. But the townside went up 8.74%.”
Kelley disagreed with that characterization. He said that the schools should reallocate money from their current budget to address any new costs, arguing that the schools and other parts of the town government are not operating efficiently enough.
“The school department and the school committee think that the people of this town are an ATM with unlimited money,” he said.
In the Dec. 2 school committee meeting, School Committee Chair Sean Costello said that the schools had “taken a backseat in terms of priorities in how we fund things in this town.”
“There are some folks in town, including the chair of our select board, who believe we do not need to be spending as much as we're spending on public education, and I believe that is because they're not looking at the numbers,” Costello said. “They're thinking with a narrative.”
Kelley said in an interview that he was hopeful that the town could find a way out of the mounting financial crisis and that it would require collaboration across the town government. Miller echoed a similar sentiment in an interview, saying that school and town employees are close collaborators in the budget process.
“We’re in this with the town, and we’re part of the town,” he said.
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