By Adam Swift
The short- and long-term health of funding for the school district was the focus of several motions before the city council on Monday night.
In the short-term, Ward 3 Councillor Anthony Cogliandro filed a motion requesting more information from school officials on potential budget cuts the schools are facing in the Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget.
“There has been a lot of confusion since the last ways and means school committee meeting, and it was brought to my attention that there have been meetings, at least in one school that I’ve heard of, that they were told that the deficit was $14 million and that there were going to be teachers losing their jobs,” said Cogliandro. “This is a school administrator telling teachers that they are going to be losing their jobs. It is completely unacceptable for that to be followed up by an email saying, oh, that’s wrong, don’t worry about it.”
During the public speaking portion of the council meeting earlier in the evening, Revere Teachers’ Association co-president Jane Chapin said educators are deeply concerned about potential budget cuts for FY26.
“We’re deeply concerned about the behind-the-scenes emails and the rumblings about budget cuts for the next school year, which have left many of us with more questions than answers,” said Chapin. “We’re demanding transparency and accountability, especially when it comes to decisions that affect the working conditions of our educators and the condition of our students. The RTA is clear, any decisions that are made about our jobs need to be made with Revere teachers in the room.”
Cogliandro said the educators deserve to know what is going on with the budget and that there needs to be more public conversations about it.
“As a council, we control the budget, and if there is something we can do to guide or to help with this process, to help maneuver funding or to cut from somewhere to give to somewhere else, let’s do it, because we need to,” said Cogliandro. “The teachers and the students we care about the most. We owe it to have a conversation about this, there are a lot of issues coming financially in the whole country, so I want to do my part to make sure that we keep everybody safe and we keep jobs for teachers in this city.”
On the longer-term financial picture, Councillor-at-Large Michelle Kelley filed a motion requesting a meeting with stakeholders in the new high school building project to discuss reducing overall costs of the approximately $500 million project.
“I brought this motion because of everything going on in the economy right now, and I think it’s time to have a formal discussion about whether we can lower the cost on the new high school,” Kelley said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in the construction world, prices for materials, talk of tariffs, and we’ve already seen this hitting close to home tonight. For example, earlier tonight, we discussed tax breaks for HYM and Suffolk Downs, and now it is absolutely clear that work has gone there as planned over the last year or so.”
On top of that, Kelley said there is the potential for a large budget deficit and position cuts in the school budget for next year.
“For me, these are all big red flags, so I am asking that the city council have this conversation, even though it may be a tough one for us,” said Kelley. “We owe it to the taxpayers to be fiscally responsible and act prudently with their money. I want to look at things like the number of sports fields, the kinds of materials they are using, and other design features to see if there is anything we can adjust to bring costs down without cutting corners on what really matters.”
Ward 1 Councillor Joanne McKenna said she agreed that it is the programs and teachers on the inside of the school and not how the school looks that is important.
Cogliandro said he agreed with the motion, and that he wanted to see all school decision-makers involved in the discussion, including the superintendent and the district finance director.
“I spoke with the mayor this afternoon right before the meeting, and he let me know that the numbers have come back on the first round (of the project) and so far it is under budget,” said Council President Marc Silvestri. “We can cut some more, but we did get some good news that it is under budget.”
