With per pupil spending in Belmont already about $3,000 per student/per year below the State average per district ($12,700 in Belmont vs. $15,900 avg.), our public schools entered the pandemic stretched to the breaking point. Now we risk plunging into a full-blown fiscal crisis with layoffs of instructional staff, increased class sizes and cuts to supplies.
Let the great game of Chess begin! As the Patch reported yesterday: the State granted Belmont $7.5 Million to build a new library across Concord Ave from the library’s current location. The grant, for the construction of a 45,000 square foot,…
Live blogging here from Spring Town Meeting. We’ve been here for close to two hours and are still snagged in debate of the first substantive issue: approval of a new stabilization fund for Minuteman Technical. The idea here is to…
We’re here at the third installment of Town Meeting, after a quick and dirty detour through a special Town Meeting. Rep. Will Brownsberger is giving us an update on the budget picture at the State level and, of intense interest…
We’re here at Town Meeting – we’ve dispensed with a lot of administrative business and are on to the meat of the Spring town meeting: Article 16 which is asking TM to approve the concept of the preliminary design of…
There are three zillion different ways you can slice the school spending pie and analyze the numbers, and none of them are particularly satisfying. One way, however, is to look at how much each town spends per resident on its…
BloggingBelmont contributor Adriana Poole provides an account of this week’s Warrant Committee meeting, where discussion turned to reevaluating the allocation of funding for the School Dept. and the Town, and some mysterious cost overruns at the Fire Department.
A letter from Belmont High School Principal Mike Harvey details the cuts that would be necessary at the High School should the town fail to ask for or pass a Proposition 2 1/2 Override to repair a structural hole in the town’s finances.
An op-ed in the Citizen Herald charges that the O’Neil and Cushing Square developments will send more than 200 new children to our schools. But will they? A 2003 study suggests that the link between development and school population is difficult to make.
There’s good reason to be very, very, very suspicious of the Board of Selectmen’s call to delay a vote on an override. In fact, the push to delay a vote on the override is part of a well worn strategy for sinking it, altogether.