North Brookfield officials debate tuitioning out, regionalization and cuts as school costs drive gap

Town officials, school committee members and residents spent more than two hours discussing possible responses to a budget gap driven largely by the proposed school budget. Participants debated three main options: a town override (additional local taxation), net-school-spending reductions (local cuts), or pursuing a tuition agreement with a neighboring district as a transitional step toward regionalization.

Sheila, a school committee member who reported DESE figures during the meeting, said the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education reported North Brookfield—————per-pupil expenditure in FY22 at $18,001.22. She also shared a preliminary figure for a proposed tuition rate in the low-$11,000s per pupil that she had been given for discussion and said any tuition contract would likely include a 2% to 3% per-year increase. Sheila told the meeting that, in her rough comparison, a tuition model could produce an estimated first-year net cash benefit on the order of $300,000 after transition costs and one-time payouts, though she cautioned that the estimate included several one-time factors and that the second-year net impact depended on buyouts, tuition escalators and special-education placement costs.

Special education…