Last night, the district had a two-part meeting, beginning with a Budget Hearing for FY 2027 and then a short School Committee meeting. The budget hearing largely touched on many of the same financial themes we have heard from the district before, including transportation costs and collective bargaining expenses, while also highlighting some more granular fiscal challenges at the school level. School Committee members asked a number of questions about multilingual programming, cuts to personnel, and the connection between the FY 27 budget and the long-term facilities plan. 

After a brief public comment period, the meeting moved on to a discussion of a new collective bargaining agreement between School Bus Monitors and the district. Notably, this new agreement requires BPS to ask Boston City Council for an extra $1 million this fiscal year to fund the contract. We will keep tabs on how the City Council reacts to this request as well as similar asks in the future. 

Here at the Shah Foundation, we wanted to provide readers with an in-depth look at some of the budget issues for FY 2027. Our team has put together the below analysis, with further commentary and statistics at the link on the bottom of the page.

Budget and Staffing: 

Boston Public Schools proposed a $1.71B budget for FY2027, a 4.5% increase over the current budget, and greater than 8% increase from the $1.58B budget initially passed for FY2026. The total employee headcount for BPS will drop to 10,496, down 5% or 531 positions from FY2026. Total enrollment for the 2026 school year is just 44,416  (46,547 including in-district charters), down more than 1,600 students from 2025 – the lowest enrollment on record. This 8.3% budget increase over last year’s adopted budget is the second largest increase since FY2019. Since that year, the budget has increased by 54%, and total staffing is more than 12% higher. Over the same period, enrollment dropped by 14%, and the total number of BPS schools receiving funding has decreased to 106, down from 124.

The budget increase comes largely from non-salary spending (+12%) compared to salary spending (+1%). Within salary spending, the cuts to administrators (-$3.5M) and teachers (-$6.5M) drove the bulk of the reduction, but this was offset by significant increases to spending on part-time (+$10.6M) and temporary teachers (+$4M). And despite a significant reduction in roles (-8%), the total spending on aides increased slightly (+$1.3) for FY27. Within non-salary spending, employee benefits made up the lion’s share of this increase, up to $219M in FY27, up more than 20% or $40M from the FY2026 budget. However, increases in transportation (+$8M) and purchased services (+$7M) also contributed. The budget calls for cuts of employees across all job categories, with the largest proportional cuts coming for aides, administrators, and support. As the largest group, teachers will see the highest total number of jobs cut – more than 250. Note that the total headcount for every job category except secretarial is higher than it was in 2019, and the total number of employees is only slightly below FY2024 levels. 

General education sees almost all the cuts restricted to elementary education – elementary ed grade 3 will see 56 FTEs eliminated and a 62% budget cut. Universal Pre-K will see 28% or 8 of its FTEs cut.  Special education sees large cuts paired with some increases – SPED McKinley has its budget and FTEs slashed by more than 50%, and ‘SPED Severe Intellectual Impaired’ will see 30% of its FTEs eliminated along with a 22% budget cut. However, ‘SEPD Generic/ Resource’ will increase its headcount and budget by more than 25% and ‘private placement’ will see a $7M budget increase. It should be noted that BPS says that some of these FTE reductions are the results of re-coding people from one job to another – particularly within bilingual programs.  However, the district has not provided any actual breakdown of jobs eliminated vs. positions re-coded vs. vacancies left unfilled, leaving significant ambiguity in this analysis and for parents of BPS students.

To read more interesting analysis about next year’s budget, click here.