June 27, 2017
Honoree Suzanne Bump, Auditor of the Commonwealth
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Division of Local Mandates
One Winter Street, 9th Floor
Boston, MA 02108
Dear Ms. Bump,
The Framingham School Committee kindly requests your consideration regarding unfunded mandates, specifically the Educator Evaluation mandate that was updated last year.
In response to the Educator Evaluation mandate, the Framingham School District has incurred a significant increase in expenses including the hiring of Vice Principals at every school to manage the evaluations, the required software, and the 2 hours of professional development required by teachers. In addition, it has recently come to our attention that we will need to purchase new software to be in compliance with these mandates, adding to the already mounting costs. The Vice Principals at each school spend at least 75% of their time managing and overseeing the required educator evaluations. Please see the table below that includes the costs to date along with the estimated upcoming costs of the new software purchase.
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In comparison to other towns in The Commonwealth, Framingham has a significantly higher percentage of Out of District Special Education students, Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE), and English Language Learner (ELL) students. Every year our budget gets tighter and tighter and at the same time our school buildings are bursting at the seams with our steadily increasing student population. Framingham is desperately trying to keep up with the rising costs based on student needs, comply with state evaluation requirements, provide the best possible education for ALL students in our district, and at the same time not overburden our tax payers. This becomes impossible when the district is at a 50.2% rate of free and reduced lunch students and there are 77 languages spoken in our schools.
The Framingham Public Schools simply cannot bear these costs any longer, and we are asking for your help to put a halt to these unanticipated/unfunded costs and require the state to fund this expensive mandate.
Sincerely,
The Framingham School Committee
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Proponent: Michelle Brosnahan
