NORTHAMPTON — With the state preparing for a rare reexamination of how it pays for public education, state Sen. Jo Comerford is calling on Northampton residents and officials to make their voices heard, pushing for changes to a funding formula she says shortchanges many western Massachusetts communities.
The senator addressed inequities in formulas that dictate funding distribution of state school and infrastructure aid during a legislative update to the City Council at its Sept. 17 meeting, where she also outlined some of the Legislature’s financial and legislative achievements and goals for the city.
In the fiscal 2027 budget Gov. Maura Healey signed July 16, legislators agreed to revive the Foundation Budget Review Commission to examine Chapter 70, the K-12 funding formula that calculates how much state aid goes to each municipality and regional school district. The commission, expected to meet in October, will study how the state can address rising education costs, particularly special education, student transportation, personnel and employee health care.
“I’m begging you to be active. This commission will have hearings here — we’re going to fight to have the hearings here. I want you to pack the rooms,” Comerford said. “I want Northampton to be more present; I want you to be present in the foundation budget. This is once in 15 years … it means working as a city, galvanizing the public. I am going to file fewer bills this year so that I can organize to shake up the Foundation Budget Review Commission.”
Discussing some of the hurdles she faces when it comes to securing state funds for Northampton, Comerford mentioned the Chapter 70 formula. She argued that the formula does not work for rural communities, noting that districts with shrinking enrollments often pay more than they receive.
“Think of Chapter 70 as a big clamshell, where half of it is what the state gives Northampton and the other half of it is what the state tells Northampton it can and should pay,” Comerford said. “The top of the clamshell hasn’t been opened in 10 years [and] the bottom in 18 years. This is the moment.”
The commission last met in 2015, when it recommended changes to the state’s school funding formula that were estimated at the time to require roughly $432 million in additional Chapter 70 aid, largely to better account for employee health insurance and special education costs.
Comerford added that while the state’s 2019 Student Opportunity Act focused funding allocations on urban school districts facing high rates of poverty, it often overlooked more rural school districts in western Massachusetts. She explained that Franklin and Hampshire county school districts have slowly declining enrollment and are facing “death by a thousand cuts.”
School funding isn’t the only area of inequity Comerford highlighted last week. She said the state’s payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) program, which offers cities and towns payments for state-owned land that falls into certain categories, uses a funding formula based on land values. Because land in eastern Massachusetts is typically more valuable than in western Massachusetts, cities and towns in this area receive less in PILOT funding.
“It’s wild — it’s like a moral abomination of a formula. It asks that Northampton’s land be seen as relative to Nantucket beaches,” Comerford said of the PILOT formula. “Of course, that’s bananas. We don’t have the land values, but that’s how we apportion state funding.”
Pointing to what she called similar inequities in grant and Chapter 90 infrastructure funding allocations between eastern and western Massachusetts, Comerford went on to explain that residents and local officials have to be loud to remind Beacon Hill of their region.
“The narrative that many people say is that Boston doesn’t care about us. That’s not true. The harder truth is that we just need to be in the room in order for them to think of us at all,” Comerford said. “We need to flex our muscles continually, because every time I look around, there’s an abominable piece of policy or a ridiculous budget line that’s just not going to be equitable for us.”
