SC: Budget will be ready when it's ready

The Norwood School Committee met last week and discussed the upcoming budget for fiscal year 2026-27.

The discussion came around the newly-minted Budget Deficit Committee, which was formed to address the structural deficit the Town of Norwood has been running for a number of years. The Town has been able to fill the budget gaps with free cash – leftover or unexpected revenues – but several boards and residents have said this is an option of diminishing returns, as you can’t really rely on that kind of revenue to fund an operational budget.

The issues with the Deficit Committee are centered on two main problems. The first, and probably most mundane, is scheduling. Much of the committee is made up of elected and appointed officials and residents. Due to summer vacations, meetings have been virtually impossible to schedule.

The second is a bit more complicated, with the focus concerning open meeting law issues. Essentially, Norwood Public Schools Superintendent Timothy Luff said discussing possible staffing reductions in a public meeting where those staff are legally entitled to view the meetings is problematic.

“Any open meeting like this could require the creation of minutes after the fact, and I don’t want conversations that will get out to the public staff and scare people,” he said. “We are here to stay and our staff is here to stay and I don’t want anybody to get nervous about this.”

That being said, Luff said his office has been working on a level-funded budget, a set of proposed possible improvements and a set of proposed reductions since June. He said they expect to have those finalized in December.

“It’s until that time that reductions will be discussed with the open public community,” he said.

Luff said the solution that’s being worked through now is the creation of advisory committees or groups that will not be subject to open meeting law, based on very specific rules.

“We have not engaged or participated yet on the committee in the way that it was envisioned, because we want to make sure we’re doing it legally and right,” he said. “That said, I did talk to the Town Manager (Tony Mazzucco) and we had a long conversation about this, and with some members of that group today, and the idea is to ensure that we are doing it right is to have an advisory (group) to the Superintendent and/or an advisory to the Town Manager.”

Luff said advisory groups can be made up of basically any kind of stakeholder, from faculty, officials or residents. Luff said the advisory group can only advise based on decisions that the Superintendent or the Town Manager can make on their own.

“For example, I am solely responsible for developing a preliminary budget prior to bringing it to you for deliberation, presentation and conversation,” he said. “So what considerations that go into those budgets aren’t necessarily subject to open meeting law, because they are my considerations. And I need opinions from everybody. I need opinions from folks here for historical perspectives. I need opinions from (NPS School Official Sean) Mannion, from department heads and from principals to advise me to create the best preliminary budget that I can.”

School Committee members hprovided some feedback on both the advisory plan and the issue as a whole. Member Teresa Stewart said she felt very strongly that the general government and the schools should have completely separate advisory groups, and added that she felt the Budget Balancing Committee (BBC) should have been tasked with the deficit working group in the first place.

“We have been trying for a number of years now to get this conversation started through the BBC and for a number of reasons it hasn’t worked,” she said. “I’m more comfortable with this iteration than the one presented to us before, but I still think the authority of the School Committee is not something I’m willing to delegate.”

Stewart said she has been speaking with the Massachusetts Association of School Committees about this issue, and said she felt that any advisory group should not be going “line-by-line” through the school budget.

“That authority rests with the School Committee,” she said.

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Luff said that’s not happening in the current plan, and that the committee will be the first to see his budget.

“This is people throwing ideas at me for what could possibly happen for improvement and reduction,” he said. “It’s those ideas coming to me, providing me input so that I can then create my preliminary budget that will be presented to the Budget Subcommittee of the School Committee and then to the School Committee through the actual authority that is there to do that. I’m not presenting any kind of preliminary budget to anyone, line-by-line, before coming to the School Committee with that.”

Stewart also said she wanted more discussion and explanation around the state’s school funding mechanism, Chapter 70, as she said the public is not aware of how it impacts Norwood. Chapter 70 has been a topic of debate for years now, as its formula does not always seem to serve the public as it is meant to in terms of state funding allocations for public schools.

Chair David Hiltz, who is a teacher in another district, said this issue of the tightening budget is not a problem that is unique to Norwood.

“This is everywhere,” he said. “Not that that’s an excuse, but we will face this head on and we ask that our Town and community partners engage in this conversation moving forward.”

Stewart said the budget is going to be looking at a lot of cuts, and that not much will be off the table.

“There will not be a lot of, ‘Oh Hell no,’ there is going to be a lot of, ‘This could really happen so get your big girl pants on,’ because it’s going to be big,” she said, “which is unfortunate.”