Over the last year, a grassroots coalition of educators, caregivers, grandparents, students and residents have been demanding level-services funding for Northampton Public Schools (NPS) and condemning the mayor’s budget, which led to cuts. Throughout the spring, six city councilors and the mayor were warned about the high costs of losing 22 educators to budget cuts.

Their warnings were ignored, and this year all that they were told would happen is unfolding. Educators have given hours of public comment documenting the ways cuts to staff are negatively affecting children and disproportionately harming our most vulnerable students — low-income students, students with disabilities, students of color, refugees and immigrants.

In one elementary school, where 50% of our students are low-income, teachers are being forced to ration reading and math interventions, including grant funds for poor students. Our mayor, enabled by a majority of the City Council, has put a first grade teacher in the position of having to decide which six of twelve qualifying students will receive additional support while the other half receive nothing.

Another first grade teacher has two students who qualify for math intervention not receiving any support and only two of eight students who qualify for receiving reading intervention services. At our most recent School Committee meeting, a beloved special education teacher at JFK announced their resignation because they could “no longer deal with physically or mentally the crisis at JFK middle school.”

This is unconscionable anywhere, but allowing such conditions to persist, especially in a relatively affluent town that prides itself as progressive, is indefensible.

Despite the dire warnings and subsequent accounts, the mayor has refused to pivot. Northampton continues to underestimate its revenues to generate large surpluses that can then be magically transformed into one-time funds and stuffed into various savings accounts. For FY24, the state certified $11.7 million in free cash, largely made up by recurring revenues, but the mayor only brought forward one mid-year appropriation to support the schools — $40,000 to hire two paraeducators for Bridge Street School — an order that resulted from safety issues and a grievance process. That is 0.3% of this year’s free cash. The mayor, chair of the School Committee, voted against the mid-year appropriation request of $600,000 and did not recommend funding it to the City Council.

The mayor will say they are simply following state Department of Revenue “best practices” to save 3-5% of recurring revenues a year for “one-time costs.” However, Northampton is averaging 5-7%, and the DOR does not suggest underfunding core public services by depriving them of recurring revenue in order to generate free cash.

There are many best practices for a whole host of issues — from providing adequate staffing to schools, to treating your workforce with dignity. It is a choice to focus entirely on one “best practice,” treat it as an immutable law of nature, and ignore all other competing values and needs. It is a choice not to adjust our financial policies and practices to meet the needs of children.

The mayor has chosen to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to the testimony of teachers, support staff, and community members and refuses to fix the harm caused by her budget. At this point it is impossible for the mayor or the six city councilors who support her budget to claim they did not know the schools are in crisis. They know, but do not think there is an actual problem that needs to be solved or even one that requires their attention.

Instead, they suggest the need to cut schools now so they don’t have to cut them later. In other words, they see the needs as too high and they will never try to meet them, so just cut them now and make degraded services the norm. In their view, the problem is that people won’t accept this politely — not that city officials need to rise to the moment and engage in a democratic process with residents to decide what priorities our budget should reflect.

When they do talk about addressing the problem, they usually blame the state. While the state funding formula does impact relatively affluent towns like Northampton and the state and federal government should be providing more resources, no help is on the horizon, but we have the means to help ourselves. Our Chapter 70 funding has been nearly flat for two decades and the city has had plenty of time to figure out how to fund education at the local level and often sold overrides as supporting the schools when only a portion of those revenues supported the NPS operating budget.

I wish I could say that the issue of NPS funding was unique. However, across a whole host of contentious city issues, the mayor refuses to engage with constituents or pivot, as a leader should, to build broad-based support for her positions and initiatives. City Councilor Marissa Elkins recently remarked, in response to criticism of the lack of transparency in the capital planning process, that the mayor does not have to listen to anyone and could consult a chia pet if she wanted.

To think this is one thing, to say it tells us a lot about the confidence of this administration and supporters to do whatever they want regardless of its impact or community opinion.

Michael Stein is a Ward 4 School Committee Member and chairs the Budget and Property Subcommittee.