The Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents (MASS) has launched a new rural caucus with five established legislative priorities, chief of which is securing $60 million in rural school aid.
Sheryl Stanton, superintendent of the Mohawk Trail and Hawlemont regional school districts and a member of the association’s Executive Committee, said the goal of the new caucus is to bring rural superintendents together to push for legislative changes that would benefit rural schools.
“I launched a rural caucus of [the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents], and so, we brought all the rural superintendents together in a room and sat down for two hours to talk about the work that we’ve done, ” Stanton told the Mohawk Trail School Committee last week.
Patricia Kinsella, superintendent of the Pioneer Valley Regional School District, likewise told her district’s School Committee last week that she had attended the superintendents’ roundtable meeting, in which they discussed what needs they wanted to prioritize in their legislative agenda.
Surprisingly, despite superintendents and school committee members for years saying the solution to the financial challenges rural schools are facing is changing the state’s Chapter 70 funding formula for education, their top priority is increasing the rural school aid line item in the state budget to $60 million, as was recommended by the Special Commission on Rural School Districts. Kinsella said the superintendents believe the $60 million ask is more feasible than changing the law that underpins the Chapter 70 calculations.
“We are asking for the full funding, not a penny less, of rural school aid,” Kinsella said. “Because breaking open the Chapter 70 funding formula, while absolutely necessary, is an enormous lift and it has an impact on every district across the state. And so there’s an awful lot of legislative horse trading that needs to happen. Rural school aid, however, is a defined amount of money separate from Chapter 70, a much smaller lift. And given the billions coming in through the Fair Share Act, $60 million a year is a drop in the bucket.”
In the state’s fiscal year 2026 budget, $12 million was allocated to rural school aid, a $4 million decrease from the $16 million that had been allocated the year before. In her version of the state budget for fiscal year 2027, Gov. Maura Healey has increased that allocation to $20 million. The budget is now being reviewed by state legislators.
Kinsella said the rural superintendents’ other priorities include asking the state to use revenue from the Fair Share Amendment, which imposed a 4% surtax on annual taxable income exceeding $1 million, to fund a supplemental appropriation for a one-time reimbursement for health care costs that school districts saw due to rising health insurance rates; passing S.314 and its counterpart H.517, “An Act to Provide a Sustainable Future for Rural Schools“; and providing greater transparency on how the revenue from the Fair Share Amendment is being spent.
No. 5 on their list is changing the Chapter 70 formula.
“It feels old and stale. I’ve said it 100,000 times and we’re gonna say it another 100,000, everywhere we go … the formula is the problem,” Stanton said.
Stanton said the effort to bring together the rural superintendents, who have for years been saying that stagnant state aid is not keeping up with rising costs and is placing unfair burdens on rural communities, may be able to better show their urban counterparts how they have been affected by the formula.
The Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents already has an urban superintendents network that meets monthly to discuss problems that urban schools are facing and brainstorm solutions.
“You have increasing costs that aren’t going anywhere but up, and then you have flat aid,” Stanton said. “This gap is just going to get to a point — and we’ll see it in the next few years — that the gap is insurmountable.”
Kinsella said she thinks the rural message is starting to get across to state officials, particularly as the state works to support farmers in making local food systems more sustainable.
“We need to be supporting our agricultural families. There is a succession crisis looming in the transfer of agricultural lands from older farmers to younger generations. It is hard for a young family to think about staying put and farming when they might have to put their kids on the bus for an hour to get to a school in a super-regionalized district,” Kinsella said. “So our point to the state has been if you want to have food, you’ve got to support farmers. You want to support farmers, support local schools.”