"It's Depressing': Swampscott School Committee Approves Budget In Split Vote

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — The Swampscott School Committee narrowly approved a streamlined budget for Fiscal 2025 with members once again expressing frustration about constraints of marginal budget increases each year.

The $32.6 million budget is a 5.4 percent increase over the previous year and includes mostly level-funded programs with some additional increases in special education obligations — including those required for out-of-district students. Superintendent Pamela Angelakis said the budget is "workable" and fulfills her mission of fully staffing the new K-4 elementary school and expanding career technical opportunities while seeking efficiencies wherever possible across the district.

Unlike last year, when the School Committee pushed for a budget that exceeded town recommendations, this one appears to fall within the general increase of 2 percent-plus-new-growth prescribed for most municipal departments. It includes some stabilization and circuit breaker spending to absorb the additional expected special education costs — which can be especially variable from year to year.

School Committee Char Suzanne Wright and SC members Carin Marshall and Amy O'Connor voted in favor of the budget, while SC members John Giantis and Glenn Paster voted against it.

O'Connor said she cast the deciding vote in favor "begrudgingly."

"As many schools are going to their towns and looking for (property tax) overrrides, I've found the question to be: 'Why don't we have an override?'" O'Connor said. "We don't actually need an override because we're undertaxing. We've talked about it amongst our group a lot. It certainly hasn't got any traction. But I don't know how sustainable 2.2 (percent increases each year are).

"Actually, I do know. It's not sustainable. I beg the town to really evaluate that."

Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald has said that keeping tax increases in check annually is an effort to bring Swampscott to a median level across the North Shore in comparison to recent history when it was one of the highest-tax towns in the region, as well as an acknowledgment that the town has the oldest average resident population on the North Shore with a disproportionate number of property owners on fixed incomes.

Still, there was a sense of frustration that those types of budget constraints prevent the district from making the substantial investments needed to push it forward into the future.

"If anything, we're uplifting the schools at how well they are doing despite the chipping away that's been happening," Marshall said. "It's not ideal. We're not even meeting all of our goals. This is a workable number. We're just bringing up: 'Is that enough?' Should workable be what we're aiming for every year?"

"It feels depressing," Wright concluded before the public hearing and vote was taken on Thursday.

The budget now goes before the Finance Committee before it is incorporated into the general operating budget presented at the annual town meeting for approval.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)