Education

Providing a quality education to all students has always been a close priority of mine. In the FY25 budget, we made history with the education spending we appropriated for aid to local school districts. It’s called Chapter 70 funding, and it’s the main mechanism for state funding of local public school districts. We are continuing the historic investments we started in last year’s budget–for childhood nutrition with free universal school meals, for higher education with free community college, and for public school construction with the funding boost to the School Building Authority–and are now adding to these a huge investment in public education by raising the Chapter 70 aid by historic levels. Important legislative tweaks were made to the Ch, 70 formula for the next fiscal year, North Attleboro and Mansfield are considered “minimum aid” communities due to their demographics, meaning their Ch. 70 aid amounts are calculated by adding whatever the aid these communities received last year plus $104 per student (compared to $60 per student in last year’s budget). Attleboro is known as a foundation community, meaning their aid allocation is calculated through a formula that was modernized under the Student Opportunity Act. North Attleborough, Mansfield, and Attleboro Public Schools are set to receive about $21.71 million, $19.85 million, and $55.98 million respectively from this budget, the largest increase ever in Chapter 70 funding over a previous fiscal year both in dollars and percentage terms in North Attleboro and Mansfield. Additionally, the legislature is keeping its commitment to reimbursing communities for charter school tuition at 100% for the first three years of a student’s enrollment.  

I am thrilled with this increase, and I fought hard to ensure we increase state support to our schools, which have also dealt with inflation, higher demand, and other obstacles, like everyone else. This is a historic win for students and for our cities and towns, enabling them to be able to provide every child a first-rate education. I will continue to fight for more funding for our district. 

I have also brought funding back to our district such as funding for a robotics program at North Attleboro High School and for air ventilators to ensure that our students and staff have clean air in their schools. We also worked to include funding for the School Nurse Liasion Project to help address the mental health needs of students. We were also able to secure funding to build a playground at Roosevelt Ave Elementary School as well as funding for a design study for a playground at the Robinson Elementary School in Mansfield. We have also secured funding to upgrade Martin School's playground to make it ADA accessible as well as secured funding for new band uniforms for Mansfield High School. I have also been one of the leading advocates for getting North Attleboro High School in the pipeline with the Massachusetts School Building Authority to either build a new or renovate our high school. We were very pleased with the progress we had made when we learned that North Attleboro made it into the eligibility period for getting a feasbility study. The district is currently in the feasibility study process. We will continue to support this project to get it across the finish line.