Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How can I help?
    • Stay informed as we make our way through the budget process.
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Amherst and ARPS are what Massachusetts calls minimum aid districts, which means that our schools have declining enrollment. This is true of 211 of the 316 school districts in Massachusetts. Because we are minimum aid districts, we receive our state education funding under a different formula than districts with stable or growing student populations, and the bottom line is that our funding does not keep pace with our costs. 

The Amherst and ARPS school districts have been cutting positions for years in response to budget cuts and shrinking enrollment. Over the last twenty years, 25% of teaching positions in the elementary schools and 35% of teaching positions at the middle and high schools have already been eliminated. But costs are still rising, due to inflation, and rising personnel and health insurance costs, something facing most municipal departments in Amherst as well. 

 

Over the decades, the state has shifted a greater and greater percentage of the educational funding burden to local governments, and it is hard for local governments to keep up.  In Amherst, we have the additional challenge that 52% of property is not taxable, with a large share of that owned by Amherst College, UMASS Amherst and Hampshire College. This means that we must rely on a relatively small tax base to fund all of our municipal services and schools. Many of our services are scaled to serve our entire community, but 40% of the residents are footing the entire bill. 

Our schools are funded by a combination of state aid and local budget allocation. For the elementary schools, the local budget allocation comes from just the town of Amherst. For the Regional Schools (ARMS & ARHS), this local allocation comes from Amherst, Leverett, Pelham and Shutesebury, according to a formula devised by the four towns. 

 

Each year, the Governor creates the state budget and tells school districts what they can expect in state aid. A preliminary number is put out in January and an updated number later in the spring. 

 

In Amherst, the Town Manager creates a budget each winter. Typically, each “sector” of the community is given a percentage increase over last year’s budget. The “sectors” are the Elementary Schools, the Regional Schools, the Library and the Municipal Budget (all other services in town). The budget is not developed based on need, but rather as a simple percentage increase, and each “sector” gets the same percentage increase. The Town Council determines the percentage increase each year. 

 

The Superintendent then must figure out how to provide services based on the amount of state aid and local allotment she will receive for the following year. 

 

In FY25, the four towns allotted the Regional Schools an additional $355,440 to close some of the budget gap and would now prefer that it not be included in the number from which the percentage increase will be determined in FY26.

Good question!  Many colleges and organizations around the country have financial agreements with their host towns and cities precisely to help offset the financial burden they place on their communities.  Both Amherst College and UMASS give significantly less to the town of Amherst than many comparable colleges and universities. 

 

UMASS: In 2023, UMASS and the Town of Amherst reached a new five-year financial agreement. Under it, UMASS Amherst will provide the Town of Amherst approximately one million dollars annually ($700,000 for fire and ambulance services, $100,000 toward services supporting safe and healthy neighborhoods, $200,000 to the public schools ($185,000 to the Amherst Elementary Schools and $15,000 to ARPS), and $25,000 for other town services). The agreement was announced June 2023, is retroactive to July 1, 2022 and goes until June 30, 2027. The agreement is here.

 

Amherst College: Amherst College has an endowment of $3.342 billion dollars, owns property in Amherst assessed at nearly a billion dollars, and pays only $650,000 in property taxes on certain taxable properties. The most recent agreement between the Town of Amherst and Amherst College is here. The Amherst elementary schools will receive $125,000 per year for three years. The Amherst Regional Middle and High School will receive a combined $125,000 per year for three years.

Under Massachusetts’ current funding system, for each student who leaves their public school district for a charter school, almost all of the public (state and town) funding for that student follows the student to the charter school.  And while it seems as though the math should work, it doesn’t. Because students “choice out” from different classrooms, grades and schools across a school district, the costs to operate the district remain relatively unchanged. Schools cannot eliminate a fraction of a teacher or principal or stop heating a fraction of a school. Many of the costs associated with running a school district do not “scale down”.

 

For each student attending a charter school, Amherst sends the cost of educating that student in our schools to the charter school, even if actual per-student costs at the charter school are lower. In many cases this cost differential is significant because our schools educate a larger proportion of high-need students (English language learners, students with disabilities, low-income students) than some of our competing charter schools. While charter schools select students by lottery, many do not offer the special education supports, especially intensive need programs, that make them a feasible choice for all students. Teacher experience and pay also plays a role. Some of our competing charter schools end each year with multi-million dollar surpluses due to this inequity in funding. 

 

In 2023, the current charter school funding policies cost the town of Amherst nearly $3.8 million ($2 million for the Amherst School District and $1.8 for the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District). 

 

Mass Promise to Invest is a grassroots group that has come together to advocate for a change in this funding formula for charter schools. You can sign the Amherst specific petition here: https://chng.it/rxXgr2dhnM

The short answer is no. 

 

Each year, the amount that each of the four towns give to the Regional Schools for the operating budget is determined by what is called the assessment method. This is a formulaic way of dividing up the funding for the Regional Schools based on each town’s ability and responsibility to pay, according to state calculations. There does not seem to be, however, a prohibition on one town giving additional money outside of this calculation, and in fact, Amherst has done this in the past for specific projects. 

 

Shutesbury, Leverett and Pelham all have Town Meetings instead of a Town Council, so their processes for allocating funds to the Region are slightly different than in the Town of Amherst. The three towns are also much smaller than Amherst and students who reside in the three towns make up a small portion of students at ARMS and ARHS. The three towns also have much less money than Amherst. 

 

It is important to advocate to all of our governing bodies for more money for the schools, including the town leadership in Leverett, Shutesbury and Pelham. Amherst, though, does not have to wait for the three towns to make a contribution in order to allocate more money to the Regional Schools.  If Amherst is currently giving additional capital funds to the town, the library and the elementary schools, the Regional Schools should benefit as well.

 

We are definitely NOT still paying the same number of staff as when we had more students. Over the last twenty years, we have reduced teachers by 25% at the Elementary Schools and 35% at ARMS/ARHS. 

The number of teachers is not being reduced exactly in step with the decline in student population for a few reasons:

  • While the overall number of students has declined, the total number of students with high needs (students with disabilities, English language learners, low-income students) has not. At our Elementary Schools, 22% of Elementary students and 26% of ARMS/ARHS students are students with disabilities. 49% of Elementary students and 44% of ARMS/ARHS students are categorized as “high need”. These percentages are much higher than in the past. 

  • We now have many specialized programs within ARPS, meeting the needs of students with a wide variety of special education needs.

Our school costs are not declining even though enrollment is due to a few key factors: 

  • When students leave our schools for charter schools, we are still paying for their education. The Charter funding formula is really inequitable and decimating districts like ours – Two state bills have just been filled that could help with this and we should all pressure our state reps to support them.

  • Health Insurance costs are going up so fast (as they are across the country) that they are eating up a larger and larger share of our school funding. Health Insurance went up 16% for 2025-2026. 

  • Retiree benefit costs are also very high and the districts continue to pay retiree benefit costs from the days when staff was much larger than it is today, and yet our current state funding is pegged to today’s enrollment. In addition, our Regional Schools (ARMS & ARHS) pay retiree benefit costs from within their operating budget, so must find money for these costs within the state money and 3-3.5% increase the towns give. The Town of Amherst and the Elementary Schools have their retiree benefit costs paid ON TOP OF the operating funds they receive. 

  • A significant portion of our decline in enrollment is due to loss of students to charter schools. When we lose students to charter schools, they leave from various grades and schools in such a way that one can’t scale back staff at the same rate as students leave because you need to lose an entire class of students at one grade level before you can eliminate that teacher position. You also need to continue to heat buildings even if not all the classrooms are full (although Fort River, for example, is actually way over capacity at the moment and our elementary schools added 55 students in 2024-2025 so we are not seeing a decline in enrollment every year).

  • Our schools are consuming less of the Town’s operating budget than in the past. Even in just the last ten years, the share of the town’s budget going to our schools has fallen from 52% to 47%, so while the actual costs are rising, the share of Town resources going to fund the schools is falling. 

See this article for more information.

 
 
 
The Town’s Financial Policies, state the following on Page 5:
“Free Cash in excess of the goal reserve amount should be used for non recurring emergency expenditures, or appropriated to a Stabilization Fund for future capital projects and equipment purchases, or used to provide property tax relief. This policy, in combination with the other reserves policies, will provide a strategy to avoid creating future operating deficits by over reliance on Free Cash to subsidize the operating budget.”
 
So, by policy, the remaining free cash can be used for one-time expenses or put into the capital stabilization fund. The way it works is each year the Town Manager draws up financial orders and submits them to the Council. They vote on whether to appropriate the money as the town manager proposed. The Financial Orders for the FY24 Free Cash were drawn up within days of the Free Cash being certified by the state – meaning that before that point, only people with access to the Town’s financial information would have known how much was there. The Town Manager presented orders for road and sidewalk repair (as they do every year), a sidewalk plow (that JCPC had rejected the previous spring as non-urgent) and for a waste hauler study. The Financial Orders requested that the remaining balance be sent to the Capital Stabilization Fund. Only the Town Manager can draw up these financial orders, although the Town Council can request that he do so. Someone like the Superintendent cannot request this money without the order going through the Town Manager. He is the gatekeeper of this process. 
 
The Financial orders are presented to Town Council who votes on whether or not to send them to the Finance Committee to review and recommend. The Finance Committee then reviews and makes a recommendation and they go back to Town Council for a final vote. 
 
Most of this process is in keeping with Town Council policies – those policies though have been adopted by the Council and could be changed by the Council at any time. 
 
In Northampton, school advocates are arguing that part of the city’s free cash be used to restore teaching positions – an argument that has not been made in Amherst in part because it is not in keeping with the Town’s financial policies and because it is not a solution to an ongoing problem and would only cause the same deficit to appear the following year. 
 
The larger question in Amherst is whether financial decisions being made at the time of the budget process and during the year are causing the amount of free cash to become as large as it is and whether some of the money that becomes free cash (and is then only available for one-time uses) could instead stay in the operating budgets and be used in that way. Some of the reasons for free cash are unfilled positions, investment income, underestimated revenues and overestimated expenses. One reason the town is building up the capital stabilization fund so large is because they intend to fund one of their large buildings fully with cash.
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