Mayor Creates An Alternate Reality for the State of the Framingham Public Schools

In a prior article on August 5, the completely different approaches of Epstein and Sisistsky in the Framingham Mayoral race were explained:

The Framingham Mayoral Race - A Study in Polar Opposites

In the following month, two opposing narratives have developed on the state of education, infrastructure and environmental action in Framingham.

The Mayor, Charlie Sisitsky, thinks that everything’s going great, as he makes clear in this clip from an Instagram interview of both Mayoral candidates by Matt Shearer, of WBZNewsRadio, earlier this year:

Everything's Going Great in Framingham Says the Mayor

In this article, we explore the different stories on education.

The Mayor’s recent mailer on education expands on his view that “Everything’s going great” by pointing to a series of ‘facts’, which focus on teacher contract and bus contract negotiations, operating and capital budget funding, even an implied support for climate action by saying that new school roofs will be able to accommodate solar panels (as if any new roof wouldn’t).

It is very easy for voters to be misled by this mailer.

One example is the 6% annual school budget increases he claims.

That does sound good until you realize that if the full increase in student Chapter 70 aid for low income, non-English speaking and special needs kids provided by the Student Opportunity Act had been allowed to flow fully to the schools, the budget increases in FY23 and FY24 would have been 8% and 10%, just like they were in schools systems with comparable changing student demographics, like Springfield, where the budget increases for those two years were 8.4% and 8.7%.

Across the state, the Student Opportunity Act gave a big boost to students, but not in Framingham, where the Mayor diverted a sizeable portion of that boost away from education. This will be detailed below.

In the very deceptive mailer, the major facts which show that the schools are in trouble are omitted, by design, and an unwitting voter could easily get entirely the wrong impression of the state of the schools.

Here are the facts which the Mayor does not want the community to know.

First a summary:

1. Experienced teachers are leaving the school system at 3 times the normal rate for Framingham.
2. Student performance has dropped in each of the last 4 reported years.
3. School buses have been late for the past 3 years.

then an explanation:

1. The Mayor, in a historic first for Framingham, systematically cut local funding of the schools budget by a total of $18 million in the last 4 years. If local funding had followed the trend established prior to the Sisitsky regime, it would have increased by about 1.5%/year on a base of $90 million. Those increases would have totaled $12 million in 4 years. So, the total loss to the school system local funding was $30 million during the Sisitsky term, when compared to the prior trend.
2. This meant 3 things:
   1. Pre-K could not be expanded to cover all 4-year-olds in the city, and we continued to have 300 kids entering kindergarten not speaking English. Pre-K expansion would have solved that and made classes manageable for teachers.
   2. Classroom aides continued to be paid about 20% below market (just like the school bus drivers) so quality was poor, and many aides were hired than fired a few months later. That also meant that support for teachers in classroom got worse.
   3. Buses continued to be chronically late, upsetting students every day, and disrupting classes for beleaguered teachers.

All of this would have been entirely avoided if the Mayor had simply kept local funding of the school budget on its prior trend. Here is a chart showing what the Mayor did to the schools:

Green shows where the funding should have gone following the prior trend. The cuts Charlie made are quite clear. The difference between the two curves adds up to $30 million in 4 years.

That’s the problem in a nutshell. The fortunate thing is that there is a solution.

The $18 million the Mayor actually took from the schools was put in the city general fund to bolster city reserves to impress Moody’s when they came in for their bond rating review earlier this year. The last thing the Mayor wanted in an election year was anything negative happening to the city bond rating.

So, he sacrificed the quality of the schools, with huge negative impacts on teachers and students, to improve his re-election prospects, hoping that no one would notice the downslide of the schools.

All it takes to start repairing the huge damage to the school system, is for the next Mayor to return the $18 million back to the schools, at a rate of $4.5 million/year for 4 years. That would solve all the problems detailed above, by expanding pre-K to all 4-year-olds, hiring good quality classroom aides and making sure the buses run on time with well-paid drivers.

No tax increases are needed for this solution!

The future of the school system hangs in the balance in the upcoming election.

If Sisitsky is re-elected, he has no solutions for problems he won’t acknowledge, and the schools will continue to get worse and ultimately the reputation of the city will suffer, with all of the ramifications that will trigger, such as a downturn in property values, as families choose other cities and towns to entrust with the education of their children.

Already there are many example of families moving out for Framingham seeking better school. Many campaign voter contacts show this.

The remainder of the article gives the details of the 3 problems the Mayor wishes no one to know about, with full data.

1. Experienced teachers are leaving the school system at 3 times the normal rate

It is easy to tell this is happening. When an experienced Framingham Public Schools staffer leaves, and is replaced by a new less experienced one, with pay typically about $40,000 less, that difference is commonly called turnover savings.

Here is a chart which shows turnover savings, with the Sisitsky years shown in red. [Note that this chart is based on information drawn from Framingham Public Schools budget books.]

In FY2022, the fiscal year prior to Sisitksy becoming Mayor, the turnover savings were $1,750,000, corresponding to about 44 experienced staff leaving, which was largely due to expected retirements.

Staff turnover savings in the Framingham Public School rapidly increased during the Sisitsky term in office.

For FY2026, turnover savings jumped to $5,750,000. That corresponds to 144 experienced staff leaving. That is 3 times the normal rate.

Experienced staff are abandoning the Framingham Public Schools.

2. Student performance has dropped in each of the last 4 reported years.

That is confirmed by looking at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education data. Here is one chart from the Framingham assessment data showing the fall off in student achievement in 3rd grade English Language Arts from 2021-2024.

The fall off in performance is dramatic, with 40% of 3rd grade students not proficient. This is a devastating trend, as in the early grades, student are learning to read, with the norm being proficiency by 3rd grade. Then they read to learn. It is widely acknowledged that if a student is not reading proficiently by 3rd grade, their future prospects are quite dim.

Here is a typical explanation of the importance of 3rd grade reading proficiency:

Third Grade Reading

This is one of the key reasons teachers are finding classes so difficult to manage: student reading proficiency.

The same downtrend in student English Language Arts performance is evident in later grades as well.

3. School Buses Have Been Late for 3 Years or More

As is well known school buses have been chronically late for the last 3 years, largely due to school bus drivers being underpaid. Framingham was paying $29/hour when the market rate was $34/hour. The Mayor had control of the school bus contract and missed a key opportunity 2 years ago to raise bus drive pay to market, at a cost of about $500,000/year added to the NRT bus contract.

Then, amazingly, he had the entire contract rebid a few months later to arrive at a contract with an increased cost of $1.8 million/year and bus driver pay of just $31/hour, even though NRT had offered a rate of $32.42/hour. The whole fiasco is detailed in this article:

City of Framingham Contract Fumbles Make the School Bus Problem Worse

Worse than this is the fact that a month after the new contract was signed, the Mayor asserted in a City Council meeting on September 5, 2023, that the new school bus driver pay rate was $34/hour:

Framingham Mayor Confuses Everyone On School Bus Problems

The Mayor’s management of the school bus contract was a clear failure both in the objective of raising school bus driver pay sufficiently to solve the driver shortage, and in the financial cost which was $1.3 million/year more than should have been the case.

That completes the full picture, showing all of the relevant facts.

The Mayor sent out a mailer designed to hide the true state of the schools.

That raises trust as a major campaign issue for voters to consider when they make their decision on November 4.