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State law in Massachusetts allows regional schools, including regional vocational technical schools, to establish a Stabilization Fund for capital projects. The governing statute is Massachusetts General Laws c.71, §16 G½.
Not all regional schools have attempted to create such a Stabilization Fund. This article is written to help those who wish to give it a try.
In my experience, the process is simple but it can also be long and frustrating.
These are the basic steps to follow:
1. Educate yourself. Read the law. Talk to others who have been through the process. Ask questions. Contact me. Contact your professional association. The Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS) and the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA) are excellent resources. Talk to your school’s business manager to make sure the two of you are on this together. You need to march together. Make sure everyone knows, from the beginning, that it is not easy to use money from the Stabilization Fund. Any money placed in said Stabilization Fund could only be used for capital projects and could only be used with a two-thirds vote of the regional School Committee. It is not a piggy bank to be opened at will by the School Business Manager or the Superintendent
2. Educate your school committee. If you have a Finance or Budget Subcommittee, that’s probably the best place to start. Talk to the Subcommittee chair first, to make sure there is at least general support for the idea. Then bring it to the full Subcommittee. Make a presentation. Let them ask questions until they can’t think of any more. (The questions are the same ones you’ll hear from town and city officials later.) Once you have a strong consensus on the Subcommittee, ask that group to make a recommendation to the full School Committee.
3. Seek a vote from your school committee. Once you have the support of the Subcommittee handling money matters, place the item on the Agenda for the full School Committee. In your meeting packet, include a memorandum outlining your reasons for seeking to establish a Stabilization Fund. In the memo, address any significant concerns that have been raised at the Subcommittee level. Remember that your memorandum will most likely find its way into the hands of mayors and council members in your district. Make sure it is strictly factual. Make sure that all subsequent correspondence to your member communities uses the same or very similar language.
4. Notify your member communities of the vote. After your School Committee votes to establish a Stabilization Fund, the fun is just beginning. Now it needs to mobilize the support of the majority of its member communities. If you have 9 member communities, you need upvotes from 5 of them. If you have 18 member communities like me, you need an upvote from 10 of them. The first step is to notify the Boards of Aldermen and City Councils in your district of your School Committee’s vote. Make sure mayors and city managers are also notified.
Here is part of the letter we sent to our 18 member communities:
“On January 2, 2013, the Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School District School Committee voted to establish a Stabilization Fund in accordance with the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws c.71, §16 G½. The law requires that the communities of the district be notified and vote to approve the action of the School Committee.
The Monty Tech School Committee requests that an item be included in an upcoming City Council Agenda/Assembly Agenda seeking approval to establish the Stabilization Fund.
We suggest the following wording:
That the Town/City of ______________ vote to approve the establishment of a Stabilization Fund in accordance with Massachusetts General Laws c.71, §16 G½ for the Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School District.
5. Educate your member communities. Use the letter to member communities as an opportunity to explain why you are applying.
We add this:
“Stabilization Funds are common throughout the State of Massachusetts and in the cities and towns of our region. Most, if not all, of our 18 district communities have used Stabilization Funds for many years.
Monty Tech wishes to establish a Stabilization Fund to help address its many capital needs. As you may know, the district maintains and regularly updates a Five Year Capital Plan that identifies the major structural and equipment needs of our school district. While we do our best to keep school facilities and equipment up to date, and stretch every dollar by using the labor of teachers and students, we have found that the funds allocated for capital projects in our annual budget are not enough. to meet the needs of the district.
We believe that the creation of a Stabilization Fund is fiscally prudent.”
6. Expect questions, rejections and delays. The school district is made up of 18 member communities, including two cities and 16 towns. In some of the communities, we were invited to speak before the Board of Aldermen, the Finance Committee, the Financial Advisory Board or the City Council. In others, we hear nothing. In those cases, I suppose that our letter explaining the Stabilization Fund was sufficient. Elected officials in those communities simply voted to put the issue in the Town Hall Ordinance. In five of the Pueblos, however, nothing happened at all. Either they intentionally left the item out of the town meeting order, or they simply forgot to put it in. In one community, we entertained a long series of questions and followed up with a letter further clarifying our position.
7. Expect some unfair questions and comments. During our meetings, we heard several unfair questions, some of which seemed designed simply to annoy us. They never did. But you need to be ready. The length of this article prevents me from going into detail, but the questions fell into five main categories: the potential size of the Stabilization Fund, concerns about unmet capital needs in municipal school districts, assertions that approval of a Stabilization Fund The Stabilization Fund would automatically lead to higher evaluations of member communities, suggestions that a Stabilization Fund is something “new” or “special,” and assertions that the vocational school looked so good it didn’t need capital improvements. Finally, we hear the terribly unfair and incendiary phrase “kickback fund” more than once. Be prepared to address these issues. By reading the law and noting the severe limitations placed on the use of a Stabilization Fund, you should be prepared.
8. Don’t give up. When we started the approval process at Monty Tech, the first vote from a community was a rejection. To make matters worse, the vote was unanimous. And he was from our second largest community. The Budget Subcommittee chair and School Business Manager took the loss hard. I was disappointed, of course, but I knew we had another 17 chances to get 10 votes for us. In another community, we showed up to a town hall meeting on a Saturday morning and discovered that the Finance Committee had voted not to recommend approval. Once again, he was disappointed but not defeated. When I had the opportunity to speak at the town meeting, I thanked the townspeople for always supporting our school and reminded them that their town had a Stabilization Fund that their municipal school district had the opportunity to tap into from time to time. we didn’t. In the end, the Municipal Assembly voted solidly in our favor, despite the objections of the Town Finance Committee.
9. Celebrate your success. In our case, the School Committee voted 17-1 to establish a Stabilization Fund. That vote took place on January 2, 2013. Our ninth and tenth positive votes from member communities were secured, separated in time by just two or three minutes, on the night of June 18, 2013. We didn’t exactly open champagne. , but we congratulate each other for achieving success. We saw it as another small step in improving our ability to quickly respond to small to medium capital needs at our school. It’s a small step that you, too, can take with some planning and some work.
10. Spread the news and help others. Although not required by statute, we notify the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education of the vote taken by our School Committee and the names of the ten communities that supported us, and the dates those votes were cast. . I also testified in Boston on a bill that would simplify the way Stabilization Funds are created and answered questions from one or two districts trying to establish a Stabilization Fund.