The following letter to the editor was submitted by Andover resident Jake Tamarkin. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Andover News. You can learn more about our policy on opinion and commentary on our Mission and Policies page.
Over the past 10 years at Andover Public Schools (APS), enrollment, test scores and rankings have all declined (Source: Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education). This is a crisis unfolding in slow motion and to make matters worse, recent spending has not kept up with inflation, meaning that we have effectively been cutting services for several years now. And as if that isn’t enough, the state of relations between the town and its educators is worse than I have ever seen in any school district in which I have lived.
Unfortunately, the proposed budget does nothing to fix these problems; in fact, it likely will make them all worse. In a post pandemic national shortage of educators, we are losing some great ones. Among the planned staffing reductions is a member of Ipswich’s School Committee, as well as multiple accomplished professionals with ivy league teaching degrees. Why it is that the School Committee failed to secure in our new contract better talent management capabilities is a question for another day, but the very question itself serves as another reason to not simply rubber stamp their budget proposal.
To my knowledge, the School Committee has not yet formally acknowledged any of these issues, except to suggest in a recent communication that the enrollment decline is attributable to broad trends largely out of our control. However, the success of Lexington and other high performing districts in maintaining or increasing enrollment over the past 10 years suggests otherwise. To be sure, enrollment decline is an existential threat to APS, we must do everything in our power to reverse it, and other districts provide a template.
| District | Enrollment | Change | 2024 Niche.com Ranking | |
| 2014 | 2024 | |||
| Andover | 6,110 | 5,448 | -11% | 33 |
| Hopkinton | 3,461 | 4,187 | 21% | 1 |
| Lexington | 6,610 | 6,805 | 3% | 9 |
| Winchester | 4,440 | 4,331 | -2% | 10 |
As a first step, the School Committee should create a one-time Project Save Our Schools, or SOS for short, that among other things will allow for a more orderly reallocation of resources by right-sizing staffing via attrition over several years instead of the proposed disruptive cuts. Like any other important one-time project, this should be funded out of free cash, with a $2.7M appropriation this year, while the committee works with all stakeholders to acknowledge the crisis and develop a plan to address it. Hopefully, Project SOS won’t require additional funding, but in any case we can defer that decision until we have another year of learnings.
A neighbor recently told me they felt the funding level in the proposed school budget is generous. I thought “generous” was an odd word to use, as if funding a thriving public school system was an act of charity. Make no mistake: the success of APS should be a concern of every homeowner, especially given the huge influence public school quality has on real estate valuation (see this analysis, for example). It is only a matter of time before the market recognizes APS’s decline.
It’s not only in every resident’s self-interest to invest in turning APS around, it is also the right thing to do as a matter of basic fairness. We recently allocated almost all of our debt capacity to a Pension Obligation Bond in order to address budgeting sins of a previous generation, to the exclusion of a new high school, among other worthy needs. Having made a hard sacrifice to fulfill our obligation to a previous generation, we should now do what we can to benefit current and future generations. Fortunately, we have a straightforward and inexpensive solution right in front of us. Please join me at Town Meeting Monday night to vote NO on the town operating budget until the School Committee acknowledges our crisis and embraces Project SOS.
Jake Tamarkin
Forbes Lane
Andover News accepts and encourage reader submissions, including letters to the editor and opinion columns. Submissions should be 750 words long or fewer and Andover-focused. Please include your name, title if applicable to your topic and connection or interest in Andover. We also need a phone number so we can confirm authorship. Send us your prose!