The school department ended the 2024-25 school year with a $2.42 million budget surplus and began 2025-26 with a summer schedule loaded with advance work for the planned renovation of Pollard Middle School.
At its first FY26 meeting on July 14, the School Committee discussed the return of $762,000 of the surplus to the town’s Free Cash account and the decision to carry the remaining $1.66 million forward to the upcoming year’s school budget to provide special education contingency reserves.
State law restricts the use of year-end surplus funds, usually requiring non-school accounts to revert unused funds to the municipality’s general fund. School budgets, however, are allowed to carry forward certain unspent funds into their own revolving accounts such as special education circuit breaker funds.
The circuit breaker is a state reimbursement program that helps school districts pay for high-cost special education student services such as tuition for out-of-district placements.
Anne Gulati, assistant superintendent for finance and operations, noted in a memo to the committee that the surplus “is within the 2% – 3% ‘typical’ range of budget turnback.” The Needham Public Schools had a $101 million budget in FY25.
The schools in FY25 spent $1.6 million less than budgeted on outside services and other expenses. Gulati noted that these surplus funds “generally represent reserves carried forward from the previous year to meet anticipated needs, but which are projected not to be spent before June 30.”
The surplus also included more than $850,000 in unspent money from salary accounts, generally attributed to positions left unfilled either due to in-year departures or difficulty in finding candidates for open positions.
The schools also received an unexpected late-year infusion of $401,257 in state circuit breaker funds that Gulati said was related to reimbursements for spending from FY24.
Special education costs are difficult to project, and year-end surpluses are commonly carried forward to the next year’s budget. The Trump administration’s dismantling of the federal Department of Education has made projections for FY26 even more challenging.
“We’re wary of reductions to federal grants, most of which support students on IEPs, as well as to the federal accounts at the state level and potential reductions to those funding sources,” Gulati said at the July 14 meeting.
“One of the difficulties with the federal money is we get it on a reimbursement basis, and getting it late is often the same thing as not getting it at all because Needham has to spend before we get paid.”
“We have not been told that entitlements are being cut,” she added. “But the state has told us that they have not received their allocation.”
Focus on Pollard
Earlier in the meeting, the committee spent more than an hour digesting comments received at multiple public meetings on the planned renovation of the Pollard Middle School. This included three “visioning sessions” with parents and school groups, two community forums held July 9, other meetings among town staff and a meeting between the town’s project team and staff from the Mass. School Building Authority.
The discussion included presentations from HMFH Architects, which has been hired to lead the design of the project, and Hank Haff, the town’s director of design and construction.
Tina Stanislaski of HMFH explained the bulk of the work between now and September will be matching the preferred educational program to the Pollard spaces needed to accommodate them.
Stanislaski noted eight options are being considered, and there are two major decisions that need to be made before a final option can be determined: Will the new school be configured as a Grades 6-8 or Grades 7-8 school? And will the project be an addition/renovation at the current Pollard site or new construction either at the Pollard site or a parcel comprising the DeFazio Park parking lot and some adjacent DPW property?
“We’ll take these seven or eight options we have now and in the next phase we’ll choose three that best fit what the district needs. We’ll develop those more and get more detailed estimates for those,” Stanislaski told the committee.
Those decisions may alter the current $314 million cost estimate for the project. The HMFH presentation included information on four current middle school projects in the MSBA pipeline where estimated costs ranged from $732 to $896 per square foot — higher square foot averages than the town has used to date.
The committee has set an early September goal for making that decision. Once the direction is decided, the considerable work of matching the construction project to an educational plan can begin.
“A lot does have to happen in a very short period of time,” Superintendent Dan Gutekanst said multiple times of the tight timeline for deciding the overall direction of the project. “We have set up different opportunities for the community to hear what’s going on.”
The current timeline calls for an October 2026 Town Meeting vote on whether to schedule a Nov. 3, 2026 townwide override election on funding the project. That would require the language for the override referendum question be submitted for state review in August.
Noting the relatively tight timeline, School Committee member Andrea Longo Carter emphasized the need for a robust outreach program.
“We’ve all been living this, some of us for over a decade,” she said of the extended amount of time the School Committee spent in developing its school master plan, a multi-decade approach that also involves the replacement of the Mitchell School and new uses for the High Rock School.
“We sort of forget that maybe 80% of the community either has never thought about this or has thought about it in a very small way. So I actually think we have a massive communication issue that we need to deal with.”
The town expects to have a website dedicated to the Pollard project completed in August. The next community feedback and listening session is scheduled for Aug. 21, and four others are scheduled between September and November.
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