MONTAGUE — In budgeting for next year, the Gill-Montage Regional School District is betting that state support will continue at normal levels, even though public schools throughout Massachusetts have seen notable drops in enrollment this year.
That being the case, the School Committee voted on Tuesday to continue with a $24 million budget proposal that assumes Gill-Montague’s drop in enrollment this year will not be reflected in the state’s funding to the district.
The budget proposal will be discussed in detail in the district’s budget hearing on Feb. 9. It will eventually be passed on to the district’s member towns, likely with some revisions, for final approval through the Annual Town Meetings this spring.
Superintendent Brian Beck, Business Director Joanne Blier and numerous School Committee members emphasized that there is good reason to expect the state will modify its funding policy this year with the understanding that the drop in public school enrollment seems to have been motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic and will probably be temporary.
“It’s highly unlikely that they are going to base (funding) on this year’s enrollment for any school in the commonwealth,” Beck said.
Enrollment is one of the key factors in determining how much money the state provides for each public school district. Typically, Blier said, the state uses enrollment numbers taken from the fall of the previous year — meaning that state funding for the 2021 to 2022 school year would be determined by Gill-Montague’s enrollment as of the fall of 2020.
However, Gill-Montague’s enrollment dropped considerably amid the pandemic, from 934 in 2019 to 849 in 2020, Blier explained.
That is largely caused by families opting to home-school their children rather than enroll them in public schools, according to Gill-Montague’s Director of Pupil Services Dianne Ellis. Typically, she said, the number of families in the district that choose to home-school hovers in the low 40s. In the 2020 to 2021 school year, however, it is over 80.
In accordance with the state’s school funding policies, the drop in enrollment would translate to an unusually small increase in funding to the district.
However, Beck said, professional educators’ associations in Massachusetts have lobbied for the state to temporarily modify its funding policy in response to the pandemic, and there are indications that lawmakers are receptive. The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is also advocating for the funding formula to be modified this year, he said.
Ideally, Beck said, the state would use the enrollment numbers of 2019 to calculate funding for 2021 to 2022. That may not happen fully, but the state may use some compromise between the 2019 enrollment numbers and the 2020 enrollment numbers, so as to at least soften the financial impact of the pandemic.
“The picture has been much more positive than we might have feared,” said School Committee member Mike Langknecht. “We feel like we dodged a cannonball.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.