On 3/11/25 the Regional School committee rejected the initial budget with $1,391,998 in deficits, asking Dr. Xi to instead bring them a budget with a $997,000 deficit. This budget would restore the two Counselor positions at ARHS and four out of five of the ARMS teacher positions. It would keep the team model intact at ARMS. Video here.
The Regional School Committee will meet again on Friday March 14th at 5:30 to take a vote on this budget. From there, the budget goes to all four towns and I believe that all four towns must approve of the budget in order for it to be approved.
Most of the discussion centered around what each Town was willing to pay, with Leverett having just said yesterday that the most they were able to go up was 6.5% over their FY25 amount. The Region’s situation is so complicated because rather than use the method of dividing up the responsibility based on the way the state dictates, the four Towns that make up the Region, have for many years used an alternate method, which has resulted in Pelham and Shutesbury, in particular, moving further away from the proportion they should be paying. The budget they all tentatively agreed to last night (it won’t be voted until Friday) would assess each town a portion of the money based on what they call the Statutory Method, with Pelham, Leverett and Shutesebury giving 6.5% more than they did last year and Amherst paying an approximately 5.5% increase over this year. I believe this results in a budget that goes up 4.6% over this year, overall. In this instance, the ability to increase the budget is being constrained by the other towns as much as it is by Amherst. It is my understanding that Pelham and Shutesbury, in particular, could be asked to pay a larger percentage of the overall Regional assessment, but due to their limited finances, if they were assessed their maximum percentage, it would have to be of a smaller overall pie to divide up. This aspect of Regional School financing is so convoluted and challenging to understand, so hopefully I have these details straight!
Irv Rhodes stated and others agreed that whatever method they use to divide up the assessments, they must be sure that whatever the total from each town is this year, that becomes “the base” for next year, meaning that next year’s increase will be based on that number and not the original number the town’s wanted to give.
There was also a discussion of whether the towns other than Amherst had space in their allowable tax level capacity to raise taxes, as has been stated before. Amherst tends to raise taxes each year at the maximum allowable percentage increase of 2.5%, whereas Leverett, Shutesbury and Pelham have not, meaning that they have a lot more space to raise taxes before hitting their cap of how much they are legally allowed to tax residents.