A $280 million budget was adopted Tuesday by the Cambridge School Committee with 5-2 votes after several months of community engagement, a focal point of this year’s process led by interim superintendent David Murphy.
The budget reflects an increase of 4.5 percent, or $12 million, from the current budget of $268 million, a significantly smaller jump compared with the previous year-to-year increase of 9.5 percent. A large part – $8.4 million – represents recently negotiated collective bargaining agreements covering wages and benefits; the second-biggest item is a $2.2 million increase to the transportation budget.
The adopted budget is set to come before the City Council at 6 p.m. May 13. The new fiscal year starts July 1, with similar modest growth expected. It is a time of relative austerity for the city, which has seen its economy sag with postpandemic uncertainty around office space construction and now a hostile federal government.
Murphy elaborated on the conservative increase in the proposed budget document he presented to the School Committee in early March. “Given the financial debts attributable to the city’s large capital projects,” he said, noting new Cambridge Public School buildings, “and the prospect of decreasing commercial property values,” the overall 2026 budget fiscal year had to grow less “to maintain vitally necessary financial flexibility.”
The letter goes on to note that the budget has increased by 25 percent over the past five years, leaving the district “exceedingly well-positioned to serve students.”
Not everyone agreed. “We have, over the course of 20 years, doubled the amount of money that we are spending on the school system. You know, that’s a 50 percent increase over and above the rate of inflation, and student achievement really hasn’t budged,” said member Elizabeth Hudson, explaining her choice to vote against a spending plan for the second year in a row. “I don’t think we know what everybody is doing. I don’t think we know how we’re utilizing all of the assets that we have, and until we take that seriously, I’m going to vote no on every single budget.”
This year she was joined by Richard Harding, who took issue with the lack of substantive discussion within the committee. “We passed a more than a quarter-billion-dollar budget tonight, and we didn’t say a word about it,” he said. The vote being taken at the top of the night without discussion resulted in a resolution by himself and member Hudson being put off and met with criticism from other members.
The resolution aimed to affirm the importance of paraprofessional staffing and directed the superintendent to reallocate resources from nonstudent-facing personnel for just two more paras in the FY26 budget. The resolution also directed the superintendent to execute teacher and administrator evaluations “fully and faithfully” in hopes of adequately tracking educator effectiveness.
While member Rachel Weinstein agreed with the premise of their efforts, she felt the timing of it set a bad precedent. Mayor E. Denise Simmons agreed, setting it aside to be addressed at a later date.
The People’s Budget
The budget process has been inclusive and long, with meetings starting in the fall of last year. The calls for increased community engagement in the budget were met, according to several public commenters who spoke before voting Tuesday, many of them members of a Solidarity Squad – a group formed in the summer that then mobilized around the closing of the Kennedy-Longfellow elementary school, creating The People’s Budget to present a draft of priorities.
“Many of us have been fighting for fully and equitably funded schools for a long time, and this budget reflects the closest any of us has gotten to having a budget that reflects community input,” said Christopher Montero, a history teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and Squad member. Still, he says, it lacks equitably distributed paraprofessionals.
Just before the adoption vote, the Cambridge Education Association came to a long anticipated agreement with the district on the closing of the K-Lo school and how staff would be reallocated. While the agreement lays out plans for staff who have not yet received placements, Murphy had promised at a March 26 budget workshop that K-Lo paraprofessionals would be kept on.
Looking for “wiggle room”
Despite the budget already being adopted, Hudson pointed to built-in “wiggle room” to allow for bringing on the two new paraprofessionals suggested in the resolution: “We make changes to positions in the course of the school year, and that doesn’t require approval. It is my understanding that as long as the top-line number stays the same, it doesn’t matter from a city standpoint.”
Simmons pushed back, citing the national political climate “We know we’re going to lose federal funding, and so where we can say we might have some wiggle room, I’m saying, well, let’s not play with it.”
According to district director of communications Jacklyn Piques, the district has not received any indication it would lose federal funds. A threat from the Trump administration issued Thursday targets public schools getting Title I funding – for those with larger numbers of low-income students – unless it could be confirmed that “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives were eliminated to the satisfaction of the new leaders. Out of a total $7.3M in federal funds, $4.7 million in the upcoming budget are entitlement grants, Piques said.
Cambridge officials “are committed to ensuring that CPS students would remain unaffected should there be any changes. Should the need arise, we would adjust our budget appropriately to ensure that meals remain available at no cost and that students receiving services through federal grant programs will not lose access to resources,” Piques said in an email Friday.
This post was updated April 15, 2025, to clarify federal funding expected in the next fiscal year.
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Hudson has worn out her welcome. Between this recalcitrance here and her support of Paul Toner, I regret voting for her and won’t again.
Over 40% of our 3rd graders can’t read at grade level despite spending more per student than anyone else. That is apalling and mind boggling. What the heck are Cambridge schools doing if they don’t teach kids to read?!
3rd grade matters particularly bc after that you’re supposed to learn things through reading about them and if you can’t read well, you won’t progress. [phrased as something like ‘first learn to read, then read to learn’]
What aren’t we doing that we should be? What are we paying for that isn’t helping?
I’m not a fan of Hudson’s Toner stance, but I 100% support her questioning of how we can spend so much without evaulating its effectiveness.
Kudos to Hudson and Harding. We might be the only city in the USA that closes a school with an 8 million dollar budget, and the overall CPS budget increases by 4.5%. No wonder the students can’t do math. The adults can’t do math either. Hopefully, the city manager and council are brave enough not to back this proposed budget. It’s never going to happen. Same old, same old.