Triton DCC reviews 5-year rolling average as one option to smooth volatile school assessments

Triton Regional School District officials on Feb. 26 walked representatives from Rowley, Newbury and Salisbury through how state school-aid rules determine each town’s assessment, then presented a specific alternative formula — a 5-year rolling-average of enrollment — as a possible way to reduce year-to-year volatility.

"Tonight's presentation is to address the DCC's question of what a 5% rolling average alternative assessment could look like," Erica Coles Jacobson, a member of the working assessment committee, said as she introduced the proposal. She repeatedly framed the slides as a starting point for discussion rather than an endorsement.

The presenters began by reviewing Chapter 70, Massachusetts’s school-finance formula. Nerissa, a long-serving school committee member who led the technical overview, said Chapter 70 uses a foundation-budget calculation based mainly on enrollment and a set of state assumptions for staffing, services and other inputs. She noted that Triton has been a "hold-harmless community since 2011," meaning the district receives a guaranteed minimum aid amount that can create a cumulative gap between what the state calculates and what a district actually spends.

Those cumulative differences are significant in Triton’s case: presenters showed a Chapter 70 "gap" in the millions of dollars and explained that incremental per-pupil hold-harmless adjustments reduce that gap only slowly. They also described other state funding streams — regional transportation reimbursements and special-education circuit-breaker and IDEA reimbursements — that are calculated and paid on different schedules and can add further unpredictability to the operating budget.

The working-group proposal would replace the statutory two-step assessment (step 1: state-calculated minimum local contributions; step 2: apportionment of the remaining operating assessment by October 1 enrollment ratios) with a single step that apportions the operating assessment using a five-year rolling average of resident student enrollment. Under the committee's examples, that model would have produced earlier, more predictable numbers for town budget planning.

But the modeling also showed the zero-sum reality of any reallocation: over the historical five-year window used in the slides, Newbury would have paid about $880,000 more, Rowley about $500,000 more, and Salisbury about $1.4 million less. "There will always be winners and losers," one presenter said, adding that such shifts make municipal buy-in politically challenging.

Town representatives raised the political difficulty of selling a rolling average to voters, particularly taxpayers who do not have children in the schools. "Why would I pay a higher assessment for heads I don’t have in school?" one select-board member asked. Several officials urged exploring more limited "circuit-breaker" or reserve approaches at the town level — for example creating town-held rainy-day funds to smooth spikes — and also suggested considering hybrids such as keeping the state step 1 minimum-local calculation but averaging only the step 2 enrollment ratio to reduce volatility.

Presenters also flagged the procedural barriers to any change: an alternative assessment must be written into the regional agreement and then be approved by town meeting in all three member towns; the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) commissioner must also approve the method before it can be used. That raises a higher hurdle than the two-of-three approval that applies to statutory budgets.

Several speakers urged continuing advocacy at the state level, noting pending legislative proposals — referenced in the meeting as EDU 660 (a Chapter 70 study/task force) and other budget amendments — that would examine minimum-local contributions and special-education funding assumptions in the formula. Presenters said such state-level work could, over time, better align the formula to regional realities and reduce local burdens.

The committee did not take a formal vote. Instead, members asked each town’s boards (select boards, school committees and finance committees) to discuss the working-group materials locally and to return an official stance to the district communication committee in late summer. The DCC intends to reconvene or review responses in August or September.

The discussion highlighted two central trade-offs: an alternative assessment can provide earlier, more predictable assessments for budgeting, but any reallocation of the same total operating dollars necessarily shifts costs among towns — a result that may be difficult to sell to voters and would require unanimous local approval and DESE sign-off before it could be enacted.