As budget pressures abated this spring, with both state aid at higher levels than expected and funds previously earmarked for athletics user fees being freed up, Schools Superintendent Thomas Jefferson reconsidered the schools budget and, at the May 24 School Committee meeting, proposed reinstating the leadership position for the world languages department at Bromfield. School Committee members agreed that having someone in a curriculum leadership position for that department was important and voted to reinstate an interim (one-year) department leader with a reduced teaching load to be hired from within the system or externally.
Jefferson said, “We are probably the only [school] district in Massachusetts able to consider reinstating or adding curriculum-related items.”
In December, the Harvard Finance Committee was assuming a 15 percent cut in state aid reimbursement and both town and schools department heads, including Jefferson, were being asked by the Finance Committee to create level-funded budgets that did not include increases for health insurance or retirement benefits. It was in this climate of cost-cutting that Thérèse Keoseian, a senior teacher and curriculum leader for the world languages department at the Bromfield School announced her retirement, opening the possibility for financial savings of approximately $20,000. (Curriculum leaders have reduced teaching schedules, but are paid full salary plus a stipend for their leadership services.) As part of the cost-cutting efforts taking place across all departments in the town and in order to meet the level-funded budget mandate required at the time, the School Committee debated and voted to cut curriculum leadership positions, including the world languages department position. These cuts were reflected in the omnibus budget voted by the town at the May Annual Town Meeting.
The cuts to the curriculum leadership positions were controversial when they were made, with School Committee member Piali De specifically citing her concern over the loss of a curriculum leader in world languages. De asserted that reinstating that position would cost about $20,000, which she believed to be possible to find in an $11 million budget. The subject has remained controversial, with Keoseian reading from a prepared letter to the School Committee at the May 24 meeting, expressing her anger at Jefferson’s decision to cut the curriculum leadership position, stating that Jefferson “arbitrarily decided to cut the position without discussion with anyone on the world languages staff.”
The cost of the reinstated world languages curriculum leadership position will likely be paid for by funds from Devens that remain unencumbered from last year and which are separate from omnibus budget funds. School Committee member Virginia Justicz pointed out that the Devens money is nonrecurring and urged budgetary caution, saying, “There will be other items that we will want to fund in the coming year” with the Devens money.
School Committee Chairman Keith Cheveralls added that “based on budget discussions of last year, we will be dealing with these kinds of [budget decision] situations more and more frequently.”
Jefferson said, “We will have to make it [the cost of the curriculum leadership position] fit ‘somewhere’ in the budget next year,” adding that there will be “other structural pieces like teachers coming back and other variables going into next year’s budget.”