The Watertown Public Schools may ask the City to tap the Special Education Stabilization Fund created several years ago for a rainy day. The 2026-27 School Budget may be stormy, as the district faces a shortfall of $2.5 million as of Monday’s School Committee meeting. Other ways to make up shortfalls may include reinstating athletics and extracurricular fees.
Superintendent Dede Galdston provided the budget update on Jan. 12, before the School Committee’s budget hearings officially start.
“Just so everyone’s aware, (the shortfall is) approximately $2.5 million but I want to make sure that everybody is very clear about the fact that we are confident that we will be able to use a combination of different strategies in order to close the gap and fund the priorities that are central to our mission and vision,” Galdston said.
School budget deliberations will start at the end of January, and Galdston will make the preliminary budget presentation to the School Committee in February. More hearings will be held afterward, too.
The figure is based on the salary and non-salary budget requests from “budget owners,” including principals, department heads and curriculum coordinators. Galdston added that the shortfall would be more if the City had not planned to increase the education budget by 4 percent, which is more than previous years when it was 3.5 percent.
City Council President and School Committee member Mark Sideris cautioned that the City budget is not done yet, but it is based on City Manager George Proakis’ Preliminary Budget Overview.
“The Manager puts his budget together. Once it gets passed by the City Council, it usually gets done (the way the Manager proposes), but I want to make sure that people are aware that it’s subject to making sure the funding is available,” Sideris said.
Galdston said that she also has concerns about funding from the state and federal levels.
“There’s a lot of things at play right now with (the state budget) and the federal government,” Galdston said. “We just don’t know what the next six months are going to look like.”
The budget is also based on providing level services, “meaning you know what it is that we need to absolutely have in order to function appropriately as a school district,” Galdston said.
School Committee member Lisa Capoccia said she worries that level service may not be sufficient, and urged School administrators to come up with options.
“My hope is that when we look at budgets, we have multiple versions, so that we can understand what the cost of not funding these things is and what we’re losing. So it’s very transparent,” Capoccia said.
There are some ways of making up costs, Galdston said. One of the biggest unknowns, and fluctuations from year to year, is special education funding. The state provides some assistance, Circuit Breaker funds, which are based on the previous year’s special education costs.
“If we have additional funds within this budget, we can prepay out of district tuition, which is a great benefit,” Galdston said. “We can pay up to three months of private placements or a full year for collaboratives. So we can use that as a potential offset to the budget.”
Sideris suggested that School officials ask the City to use some of the Special Education Stabilization Fund to help pay for the expensive out-of-district special education placements required by some students’ Individualized Education Plans (IEP).
“Given the fact we have significant out of placement issues, I strongly suggest that you speak with the City administration, because we do have a Special Ed. Stabilization Fund that we could possibly utilize to bridge some of this gap,” Sideris said. “I am more than happy to help with those discussions.”
For the past dozen, or so, years the City has put money aside for the fund. In the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget, $250,000 has been budgeted for the Stabilization Fund.
School Committee Chair Kendra Foley noted that the Special Education Stabilization Fund has never been tapped by the schools, and a process needs to be established to decide how to draw from the fund.
Budget balancing efforts will look at a variety of areas, Galdston said.
“We’re going to look at staffing ratios for sure. We’re going to look at our potential reinstatement of athletics and extracurricular fees,” Galdston said “As you know, very generously, that we had a large balance in our revolving account for athletics a couple of years ago, and instead of continuing to charge athletic fees, we decided as a School Committee to stop having those athletic fees, which has been great, but at this point in time, that revolving fund is gone.”
School Committee member Jessica Middlebrook worried about families having to pay for students to play sports.
“I would want to make sure that we do everything in our power to not return costs to families and kids whenever possible,” Middlebrook said. “So looking at those fees, I would like for that to be one of the last resorts, because I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do with that.”
Middlebrook also asked whether the rental fees for facilities such as gyms would increase with the opening of the new high school, and help offset athletic costs. Galdston said rental fees will have to be examined soon.
“Once the gym opens again, then we’re going to be looking at the fee structure, so (the) Buildings and Grounds (Subcommittee) is going to meet, and we’ll provide some proposals around fees, since we haven’t really talked about them probably in six years,” Galdston said.
See the Superintendent’s memo about the School Budget here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CTlPz7yHEaqeBUzPACIV0dPC6CxUSt1S/view