Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper has proposed a $1.71 billion budget for the next school year as the district grapples with growing financial pressures and more layoffs.
The district is expected to cut between 300 and 400 staff positions due to rising costs, Skipper said during her presentation of the 2026-2027 budget at Wednesday’s school committee meeting.
“As I’ve been saying since last year, we’re facing challenging times and this budget represents those times,” Skipper said. “We’ll need to make hard decisions and reductions in spending that does not directly support students.”
The district is already dealing with a $53 million dollar deficit in this year’s budget, leading to a hiring freeze announced last month.
The proposed budget represents a 4.5% increase over the current year, roughly $74 million more to further invest in BPS priority areas, like inclusive education and bilingual programming. But Skipper acknowledged the additional spending is not keeping pace with increasing costs in multiple areas.
“Even with this investment, we’re confronting similar pressures that we faced in fiscal year 2026 in planning for fiscal year 2027,” she said. “The reality is that our costs are increasing at a faster rate than our revenues.”
Skipper said she expects costs to rise by some $86 million next year, mostly driven by increases in four main areas of spending: health insurance, transportation, out-of-district special education and labor contracts.
The proposed budget also accounts for a projected enrollment decline of roughly 3,000 students since the fall of 2024.
“When we experience enrollment declines and there are fewer students to educate, we also need to make reductions in teachers and staff positions because the students aren’t there,” Skipper said.
Will Austin is a former school administrator and CEO of the non-profit Boston School Funds. He told GBH News that the district faces difficult choices because it has little control over its revenue or two of its major cost drivers — labor and transportation.
“Collective bargaining agreements are ultimately approved by the city and transportation is a function of an assignment system approved long ago,” Austin said. “I think it’s fair to say that the city shops for the groceries, and BPS has to cook dinner with the ingredients they are given.”
With Boston’s budget also under stress, additional funding for BPS will be a challenge, said Steve Poftak, CEO of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. Decreasing commercial property values are affecting city tax collections. He said there are few options for Boston to significantly boost education spending without growing the property tax base.
“The only other option is new growth, both either on the residential or on the commercial side,” he said. “I think we all agree there’s some pretty significant headwinds to commercial and residential growth.”
Multiple parents and education advocates said during Wednesday’s school committee meeting that they’re worried about the impact of staff reductions on students.
“Cuts cannot come in the form of loss of paraprofessionals, programming, classroom, support and mental health services,” said Stephanie Golas, a BPS librarian and a parent. “These are non-negotiable and vital to our students’ success and wellbeing.”
John Mudd, a former member of the district’s English Learners task force, said he’s concerned the cuts could threaten teacher diversity by disproportionately falling on Black, Latino, Asian and bilingual staff.
“I’d recommend the school committee and the superintendent give budget guidance to school leaders to make every effort to protect as many Black, Latino, Asian, and bilingual teachers as possible,” he said.
BPS Chief Financial Officer David Bloom said the reduction of 300 to 400 positions will be across the district. This will include more than 200 teachers and more than 100 paraprofessionals, support staff and administrative jobs, according to the budget presentation.
Roughly 160 of those positions are at three school buildings set to close at the end of the school year.
These layoffs follow the elimination of 400 positions the district made last year. But Austin said these staff reductions are a choice.
“The district could choose to continue to provide more staffing as schools have fewer students,” he said. “That just means those funds are not then available for other priorities. It’s a trade-off.”
The School Committee will be holding several hearings to collect public input before officially voting on the budget on March 25.
