Pittsfield School Officials See FY27 Budget Without Morningside
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Retiring Morningside Community School in the fall would cut about $2.5 million from the FY27 budget.
On Monday, the School Committee held a special meeting at City Hall to discuss the proposed $87.2 million budget for fiscal year 2027. With the potential closure of Morningside looming, the committee was shown what it would look like from a draft budget and student enrollment standpoint.
"At the center is student success and student outcomes, and so we are continuously asking ourselves, any decision that we make, will it result in better opportunities, better outcomes?" interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips explained.
"In this case, for Morningside, but also the receiving schools. Have we supported the receiving schools if we were to close Morningside so that the schools can be successful?"
The proposed budget for Pittsfield Public Schools in fiscal year 2027 is $86,855,061, with $68,886,061 in state Chapter 70 funding and $18 million from the city. It is a modest, $404,500 increase over FY26. The administration needed to reduce nearly $4.4 million to achieve a level service-funded budget.
Morningside Community School was built in the mid-1970s with an open classroom concept. It serves about 374 students and has a 7 percent accountability score, outperformed by 93 percent of the state. For fiscal year 2027, the district has allocated about $5.2 million for the school.
It was reported on Monday that closing Morningside would cut more than $2.5 million from the FY27 budget, with about $947,000 of that allocated to the other schools receiving students: Allendale, Capeless, Egremont, and Williams.
"It's not a savings to put back into the pot, per se, it's a savings to be reallocated to get better outcomes for the students and for the school," Phillips said.
The Pittsfield Public Schools would have attendance boundaries redrawn and present them to the School Committee for a vote by early June.
Allendale, Capeless, and Williams would each receive about 23 percent of Morningside's student body, and Egremont 31 percent, or 72 students, based on available space. Morningside has about 60 employees, and Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance Bonnie Howland reported that the district will have vacancies to fill and reassignments available.
"There are pretty sufficient vacancies right now to if we were to do this, you know, next week, not everybody would be out of a job," she said.
Morningside has two buses, as the administration found that most of its students walk or get dropped off. They are still working on a plan for after-school programs, as the 21st Century program is housed at the school.
Overall, five teachers and five paraprofessionals would be reinstated, and 18 new positions would be allocated. All four schools would see an increase in English language services, as 25 percent of Morningside's population is identified as English language learners.
School Committee member Daniel Elias recognized that closing a school is never popular, and that most superintendents would avoid it, especially one with an interim title.
"But you're doing it because you think it's a correct course of action," he said to Phillips.
"Someone who's not familiar to our area coming in with an independent view, looking at these things, coming to that conclusion."
Last month, the Pittsfield High School community argued that $653,000 in cuts there would be too much of a burden. Teachers, former students, and the school's student representative spoke in support of their "Home Under the Dome" during public comment.
During Monday's public comment, resident Rebecca Thompson said it was heartbreaking to find that restoring the funds for PHS means taking funds from other schools because the district is facing a $4 million shortfall.
Heartening though, she said, is the Fair Student Funding formula that allocates money based on student needs, because "For too long, children at Conte and Morningside have endured open classrooms, which for more than three decades have been known to provide inadequate learning environments in which most students are unlikely to succeed.
"For the first time," she continued, "we have district leadership with the courage to acknowledge this inequity and the will to begin addressing it by allocating funds based on student needs. The result of that is a proposed increase for Conte and Morningside students in an effort to counteract the negative impact of the open classrooms, places in which both students and teachers struggle to achieve their potential for learning and teaching.
"So it is a no-win situation. For PHS to have its funding restored is to take away from elementary school learners who have for years been ignored, children who are just as deserving as every PHS student, but through no fault of their own, have not been provided an environment conducive to their learning."
Tags: fiscal 2027, Morningside, Pittsfield Public Schools, pittsfield_budget,
