My name is Jesus Leyva, and I am running for City Council at large in Greenfield. I feel fortunate to live in a place like Greenfield with so many other people who care deeply about our community and the people who live in it.
But Greenfield is not without its challenges. We have too many people with unmet needs and too few local resources to “fix” our city’s “issues.” At the heart of all local issues is the same issue: not enough local funding. But the tax burden in Greenfield is already too high and our city’s ability to raise local taxes is limited.
The largest part of our city’s expenses by department is public education. When you count expenditures the city pays on behalf of our schools, our education spending is around half of our city budget. Despite this, our local schools, and many others in low-income communities around us, are experiencing a school funding crisis.
The reason for our collective funding crisis is that our state government has historically failed to meet its funding obligations to our local schools. Each year since 1993, our city has had to increase its local education spending over its required local contribution. In 1993, Greenfield’s required net school spending and our actual net school spending were the same number. The gap between these numbers increased steadily over those 30 years and we now spend 25% over our required local contribution.
This trend began in the early 2000s and for the next 20 years, according to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, statewide local school aid funding remained flat or declined, when accounting for inflation.
The state also has historically under-calculated costs relating to health insurance, special education expenses and out-of-district educational expenses. This under-calculated amount was estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion by the State Foundation Budget Review Commission in 2015. And while the state Legislature addressed some of these issues with the Student Opportunity Act of 2019, this act failed to address the cumulative effect of lost funding that has resulted in declining enrollment in Greenfield Public Schools.
Our state school aid distribution formula is intended to be “means based” or designed to provide additional funding support to the lowest-income cities and towns. But within that formula are policies that harm low-income communities and provide a special school funding subsidy to wealthy communities outside of the “means based” formula.
One of those policies, school choice, not only is specifically harmful to the funding of low-income communities, it represents a disproportionate burden for smaller western Mass. communities. Just compare Boston’s school choice sending tuition to Greenfield’s for FY23. According to state data, Boston, a city of over 650,000 people, spent $2.4 million for school choice. Greenfield, a city of barely 18,000, spent … $2.4 million. For Boston, that’s a rounding error in their $4 billion budget; for Greenfield, it’s almost 10% of our required net school spending in a $60 million budget.
A different policy, which puts a cap on required local contributions of 82.5%, allows wealthy communities to spend far less of their local tax dollars as a percentage of their city’s wealth than low-income communities. For example, Greenfield, which has the ability to fund just 43% of its School Foundation Budget, is required to fund 43% of its School Foundation Budget. Cambridge, on the other hand which has the ability to fund 338% of its School Foundation Budget, is only required to fund … 82.5% of its School Foundation Budget.
If you think of this as an “education tax” for each city, the commonwealth expects Greenfield to pay 100% of that tax, but expects Cambridge to pay only 24% of that tax.
Massachusetts is an incredibly wealthy state. In 2023, according to our per-capita GDP, if Massachusetts was a country, we would be the fifth richest country in the world. The state government can afford to invest more in K-12 education; we cannot.
We must band together with other low-income districts across the state and demand more equitable local school aid funding for underserved communities. We must leverage our collective grief from “budget season” and direct it at the state legislative process.
Elect me to the Greenfield City Council and I will make extraordinary use of my station as a city councilor in advocating to address school funding challenges. As a city councilor I will be sincere, relentless, well informed, well organized and, if necessary, indignant in the pursuit of school funding equity.
Jesus Leyva is running for an at-large seat on the Greenfield City Council.