SAUGUS — School officials proposed to spend a portion of the $3 million Student Support Reserve Fund approved by town meeting earlier this year on Chromebook leases to help facilitate MCAS testing next year.
The fund, crafted by Town Manager Scott Crabtree, stemmed from an additional roughly $3 million put into Chapter 70 — which provides state aid to public elementary and secondary schools — by Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration. Crabtree and the Finance Committee repeatedly stressed that they were concerned about the fund being used for recurring expenses, which could create a structural deficit in the town’s budget when the funds run out.
Deputy Superintendent Margo Ferrick told the School Sub Finance Committee that the need for the Chromebooks stemmed in part from the pandemic, when students were sent home with computers and many damaged or broke the devices.
“We had about 900 breakages of Chromebooks as a result of the pandemic, and many of the ones that we do have no longer are able to be upgraded, which means they cannot [upgrade] … the software to support the MCAS testing. So we need to move forward,” she said. “That is the most urgent ask from the Student Support Fund.”
Ferrick said the proposal was for the first year of Chromebook leases, which she said would cost roughly $66,000. The leasing program would allow the town to spend less on the machines than buying them outright.
“When you go to lease them, and you finance it through Dell, as the provider of choice, you get a 3 percent reduction in cost, because we give the Chromebooks back at the end, which is actually a very good thing,” she explained. “The cost of them is broken down divided by three over three years. So we can really map out what is our ongoing costs over time. So we have a proposal in front of the reserve fund to pay one time, the first year cost of this lease for the first 900 Chromebooks that we need.”
Crabtree, in writing the warrant article, proposed allocating funds for eight uses: developing enrichment programs outside of the school day, providing at-home tutoring for students in need, administering norm-referenced student assessments to identify deficiencies in math and reading, developing and implementing parent/guardian communication and training programs, supplementing existing ESL/ELL learners, ensuring access to technology for students who don’t have it at home, developing extended day programs for students as needed, and developing any program “deemed appropriate and proven effective” with the goal of bringing about student academic and social recovery after two years of remote learning.
The Chromebooks, school officials said, fall under the “ensuring access to technology” category in the article.
Ferrick also proposed spending reserve fund dollars to bring in an expert to develop an application to “expand at a huge level” the town’s after-school and summer programs via a federal program called 21st-century funds. That expense would be $8,000, she said.
The final proposed use of the funds submitted by Ferrick was $5,000 to build out a Family Resource Center.
“We want to like get a small table and chairs, books, coloring books, really, mostly activities for the little kids to occupy themselves,” she said. “Additionally, we want to buy, build out and create like a library of almost like marketing materials about who we are, what we do, what are our services, and we’d like to outsource that printing, and maybe even somebody that has a super duper skill in, you know, creating graphic design for some of our materials. It’s kind of like a blanket statement. We don’t have quotes on everything. But it would really enhance our community and our family connections.”
“Our asks are pretty simple right now,” Ferrick added.
Ferrick also raised the possibility of using the funds to assist translation efforts for school materials, noting that doing so could cost tens of thousands of dollars.
School Committee Chair Vincent Serino stressed a need for urgency in submitting the proposals, which would have to be voted on by the Finance Committee and the School Committee before becoming a reality.
“Let’s clean up all this stuff and get what we need now and then start building off that,” he said.
Superintendent Erin McMahon, in an interview earlier this month, said the schools were grateful for the fund, which will bolster a number of existing priorities.
“It really aligns to the priorities of the Saugus public schools and really what our families have told us … we see that the student support reserve fund will really help us initiate many different projects … and while they’re one-time expenses, we are grateful, so grateful for the support of the community for this funding,” she said.
