On April 17, almost ninety minutes into a five-plus-hour hearing on Boston’s education budget, a student from the Mendell Elementary School in Roxbury stepped up for two minutes to address the City Council Ways and Means Committee.
“What I would like to say is that we need more budgets for the Mendell School to hire more teachers that speak our native language,” said the student, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
“I came to this country two years ago,” he explained, “and I know how helpful that will be, because I had some teachers that helped me, but not enough, though, because I’ve been going to some schools that have barely some teachers that speak Spanish or even French.”
A little more than a week after receiving the FY27 budget plan from Mayor Michelle Wu, the councillors were policing their own time limits as they plodded through the annual crush of hearings before the end of the current fiscal year on June 30. As in previous years, they posed questions to administration officials and heard out pleas for more funding.
Not so typical this time around was the mayor’s plan to slow spending growth, with the city’s operating budget increasing by 2.1 percent, the lowest figure since the time of the “Great Recession,” in 2009, under Mayor Tom Menino. Under the same mayor in 2003, 31 percent of the city’s revenue was from state aid and 54 percent from the local property tax. In Wu’s FY27 budget, the state figure was only 11 percent, while the property tax share was up to 73 percent, with falling commercial values shifting more of the burden to residential owners.
The budget for the Boston Public Schools (BPS), accounting for 41 percent of city spending, was up by 5.4 percent, a gain offset by rising expenses and a long decline in external funding, even predating the surge in federal pandemic relief money that ended with a “fiscal cliff” in 2025. Though a steady decrease in student enrollment was offset by the recent surge in immigration, BPS officials would later report that enrollment over the past two years had slumped by about 3,000 students.
“These pressures that we’re facing include rising costs of health insurance, transportation, increased special education services, and collective bargaining obligations” BPS superintendent Mary Skipper testified to the committee at its opening BPS session, on April 16. “This creates a great deal of tension in our budget, which is further complicated by a historic enrollment decline, due in part largely to federal immigration policy and lower birth rates.”
Skipper detailed improvements in BPS graduation, attendance, and dropout rates, along with expansion of dual-language instruction. She defended the school system’s strategy for multi-lingual learners, with more multi-lingual teachers and more students assigned to “inclusive” classrooms, but the policy was also questioned in testimony from a longtime education advocate, John Mudd. He called the outcomes for multi-lingual learners “unacceptable,” once again urging more instruction in the students’ native language—an approach also found to be more labor-intensive and hampered by a shortage of specially qualified teachers.
“Inclusion is a model and a great program for students with disabilities,” Mudd told councillors. “It is not a program designed for multilingual learners. Research on multilingual learners shows that bilingual education programs that use the native language and instruction like dual language or traditional bilingual education show better outcomes than putting multilingual learner students in classrooms where the instruction is only in English.”
In its FY27 “Bilingual/Sheltered English Immersion (SEI)” budget, the BPS plans an 11 percent cut. The decision was attributed to recoding of positions, changes in classification of teachers, and the definition of SEI classrooms, as well as time required—along with the “consolidation of classrooms as a result of enrollment declines.”
Though the BPS budget listed multiple increases for special education, the plan was criticized by Katie DeLaRosa, the inclusive education liaison for the Boston Teachers Union (BTU).
“Students with disabilities and multilingual learners are disproportionately harmed,” she told councillors. “They rely on predictable, intensive support from adults like special education paraprofessionals, social workers, psychologists, learning specialists, and other staff who provide access to classroom instruction so students can make progress. When 109 special education paraprofessionals and 25 psychologists, counselors, and support staff are cut, the students lose those very adults whom they depend on for individualized support and access.”
Over the past year, the BPS reports savings from school closings and central office efficiencies, but that total was surpassed by a 33 percent spike in the cost of employee health insurance—comparable to the increase for other city departments. At the council hearing last Friday, BTU leaders also called for budgeting health insurance costs centrally, as with other city departments.
When questioned by District 2 (South Boston, South End, Chinatown) Councillor Ed Flynn, Skipper cautioned that centralizing the costs for the BPS would need some legal review. She credited the mayor’s administration with added funding for the BPS when it became known that health insurance cost projections turned out to be too low. “But I think the main thing for us,” she told Flynn, “is that volatility in our budget is very hard to address once the school year has started.”
Mayor Wu during an Office of Housing announcement last week. Seth Daniel photo
In her April 6 budget letter to the City Council, Wu blamed “tighter fiscal conditions” for cutbacks in discretionary grant programs supporting small businesses, nonprofit partners, and cultural programming. Her budget plan outlined cuts of more than 20 percent for a number of departments, including Fair Housing & Equity, Arts and Culture, Women’s Advancement, LGBTQIA2S+, Food Justice, Black Male Advancement, and Youth Employment & Opportunity.
There was also a 42.8 percent cut in city funding—almost $1.8 million–for the Office of Immigrant Advancement. Four weeks earlier, Wu had announced a new funding partnership to support resources and programs for immigrant communities. According to the announcement, $3.1 million in new funding was committed by The Boston Foundation, United Way of Massachusetts Bay, and the Barr Foundation.
Though Youth Employment & Opportunity was cut by almost $6 million (25.5 percent), the administration’s summary added that the budget “maintains our guarantee that every BPS student has access to a paid summer job.”
At the Ways and Means Committee budget overview hearing on April 14, Councillor-At-Large Henry Santana said he was “really concerned” about year-round youth jobs. When asked about making up for lost city funding, Wu’s chief financial officer, Ashley Groffenberger, replied that “there’s a lot of intentional work that’s going into trying to create partnerships to augment or mitigate any potential negative impacts that might come from that program being reduced.”
After a follow-up question on fund-raising, she mentioned “conversations happening with other folks in the administration and external to try and supplement that.”
Santana redoubled his funding plea.
“I think it’s just so critical,” he said. “I think, right now, more than ever, our youth should not be the ones who have to sacrifice during this time right now. I think year-round jobs are so critical.”
Some of the largest spending decreases were in the Mayor’s Office of Housing, where the operating budget was cut by $5.2 million, or almost 10 percent. The department’s decrease in external funding was much larger—by $49.4 million, or almost 33 percent. Among the factors: a $5.8 million drop (26.8 percent) in federal Community Development Block Grant money and a $3.5 million (14.8 percent) drop in money from the Inclusionary Zoning Development Fund.
But there was quick response to budget cuts on social media from the Better Budget Alliance (BBA), a coalition of nonprofits, advocacy groups, and organized labor—including the BTU. On April 9, a BBA Instagram post flashed “breaking news” about spending cuts for housing, food, and immigration—while the police budget was being increased. According to the city’s summary, the Boston Police Dept. operating budget was increased by less than one percent, while its external funding dropped by $4.3 million or 33.5 percent.
A few days later, another BBA Instagram post, with a sampling of Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm,” called out the mayor for “wrecking public resources.” On April 15, one day after the Ways and Means Committee’s first budget hearing, City Councillor At-Large Julia Mejia headed up a speak-out calling for changes in the budget plan. Gathered outside the City Council chamber, a series of speakers hammered a “tax day” refrain of “taxation without representation.”
“As the City Council enters its budget deliberations, we will have the opportunity to file amendments,” said Mejia, “but we shouldn’t be in a position where we’re trying to restore funding that should not have been cut in the first place.”
The messaging went beyond the operating budget to include administration decisions about capital spending on White Stadium and plans for bus lanes on Blue Hill Avenue. Suleika Soto, a parent organizer for the Boston Education Justice Alliance, cited cuts in education, housing supports, and youth opportunities.
“But when it comes to decisions about our schools,” Soto said, “families are too often left trying to understand decisions after they’ve already been made. Each year, families are given less clarity about decisions that directly impact us, and we are expected to trust a process that feels less transparent and less responsive to the communities most affected. We are told that there’s always difficult choices to be made, but too often, those choices continue to fall on the same people over and over and over again.”
One day earlier, as the Ways and Means Committee held its opening budget overview hearing, Councillor Miniard Culpepper was drilling down for more details on a $501,165 cut in the Office of Black Male Advancement (BMA). According to the city’s budget plan, the cut was in “non-personnel” spending for “contractual services,” while the spending on personnel was slightly increased.
The city’s budget director, James M. Williamson, 2nd, told Culpepper that the cut was partly “related to community-based grant-making,” calling one of the reductions “just a workflow thing” and mentioning “the completion of the equity study.” Williamson also mentioned a “multi-year conversation” about a shift of resources for a program to BMA from the BPS, and he summed up the budget decision as the result of a “very collaborative process within the department.”
Responded Culpepper, “Jim, here’s the question: Who said, ‘Let’s cut $500,000,’ and why? I’m trying to get to the thinking that goes into this.”
Before he could get the answer, the timekeeper showed that the councillor’s six minutes were up.
