IMPACT ON THE SCHOOLS

 

Geoff has 10 years of experience as an elected official in two different cities and has a breadth of city municipal experience unmatched by any current elected official in Framingham, including the Mayor.​ 

 

Geoff played a leading role in reforming financial management in the Framingham school district, when he served 4 years on the School Committee from 2018-2021, and was Chair of the Finance & Operations Subcommittee.

 

Early in 2018, Geoff found that the entire school district budget process was in disarray, finances had been handled by a contractor who had just quit, and the school district had mismanaged Title I federal funds for low income students.

 

Geoff lead the effort to bring best financial practices back to the Framingham Public Schools by managing the hiring of Lincoln Lynch as Executive Director of Finance & Operations, and then working with him and the Superintendent to completely redesign the budget process and the budget book, which captures goals, priorities, aligns with strategic plans for the district and contains all budget information in a readable format, including extensive historical information.

 

The school district budgeting process was completely transformed on Geoff's watch and written into a new policy.

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​One of the remarkable results of this reform effort was that taxpayers were saved millions of dollars.

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Geoff discovered that the annual budget was overstating staffing costs, by not taking into account that a good number of experienced teachers retired each year. The cost savings for each retirement was about $40,000, as a high salaried teacher was replaced by a young starting teacher. This is called turnover savings. In prior budgets, the assumption was that no one retired, which was completely wrong. Once, this mistake was fixed, the budgets were reduced by the amount of turnover savings. Here are the savings by year:​

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FY20: $0.35 million

FY21: $1.5 million

FY22: $1.75 million

FY23: $2.6 million

FY24: $4.25 million

FY25: $5.75 million

FY26: $5.75 million​

 

Just one correction, which Geoff oversaw, resulted in millions of dollars saved.​

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Geoff also served for 2 as chairperson of the newly created Climate Change, Environment & Sustainability where his work in the climate change area resulted in the first school district policy on Climate Change, Environment & Sustainability in the state.

 

PERSONAL STORY&MOTIVATION

 

I moved to Framingham, MA in May 2014 from Newton, MA, where I had lived for 24 years, shepherded 2 children through the school system, and served 6 years on the Newton School Committee, from 2008-2013. In Newton, I learned a great deal about how local government works, including how goals are set and how the community can work well with elected officials to make sure objectives are met.

 

The principal lesson learned about local government was that there is often a lot of fog about decision making and the community may well be in the dark on important matters. In Newton, I worked to dispel the fog and bring facts and good decision making options to the community.

 

Although politically unknown, when I first ran for the Newton School Committee in 2005, and almost all sitting selectmen and school committee members opposed my run, I got 40% of the vote. A further run in 2007 was successful, with 60% of the vote. I was the first challenger to unseat a sitting School Committee member in 15 years. My message was that math and science, and more generally STEM, needed large improvements in what was otherwise regarded as a high performing school system.

 

When I came to Framingham, I had no plans to serve in its government, although I did serve on the school district Communications Task Force in 2015, as I had useful know how to contribute. However, when the town voted to become a city in April 2017, and a new Superintendent was confronted with some very basic, entrenched school district financial mismanagement, I thought I could usefully bring to bear my prior Newton experience to help ease the Framingham transition to a city, and to solve some very obvious problems with the Framingham Public Schools and also the Framingham School Committee, which displayed surprising dysfunctionality when observed more closely.

 

A key experience I had during my elected service was that, although the school district had been well funded during the town years, when Framingham became a city, its new Mayor, Yvonne Spicer, struggled to fund the schools properly, largely due to poor financial advice from the city CFO, and the remarkably adverse financial impact of the new City Council, which dropped the annual property tax levy increase to 0% for 4 years, totally stalling city revenues.

 

When a new Mayor, Charlie Sisitsky, was elected in November 2021, on a platform of major change, including improving communications and, very specifically, ensuring that the school district was well funded, hopes ran high. However, the city’s financial support of the school district abruptly changed for the worse.

 

After solid annual increases for the school district of the locally funded portion of the school district budget, the local contribution, during the town years, followed by substantially smaller increases during the Spicer years, the new Mayor made huge cuts in the local contribution.

 

It dropped from $89.8 million in FY22, the last Spicer year, to $84.8 million in FY23 then to $80.0 million in FY24. A huge annual drop of $10 million in school district taxpayer funding. In FY25, a portion of the drastic cuts was restored and the local contribution rose to $86.7 million, still $3.1 million below the FY22 level. In FY26, the local contribution was set at $90.6 million.

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The net result of 4 years of Sisitsky budgeting was that about $18 million was cut from local city funding of the schools.

 

On top of that, there were obviously no increases. Increases had typically been around $1.25 million/year, so over 4 years, the amount lost, in addition, due to no increases was $12.5 million ($1.25 million + $2.5 million + $3.75 million + $5 million).

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If the local contribution had remained on the trajectory established during my School Committee service, which was included that $1.25 million annual increase, the schools would have had about $30 million more in funding.

 

The upper graphic on the right shows the Mayor's impact on the schools. The lower graphic shows in green the trend if the Sisitsky cuts had not been made.

 

​The Mayor has proven to be a major obstacle to educational recovery from the pandemic. It is hard to imagine anyone being less supportive of our kids' education. His financial cuts and the damage they have caused explain why teachers are abandoning the Framingham Public Schools in droves.

 

There are many more areas to be concerned about in the city, as the same lack of management ability on the part of the Mayor is dragging the city down.

 

It turns out that there is a huge problem with funding city infrastructure.

 

Enormous backlogs have been silently building in water & sewer, roads and school building roof replacements. The total backlog lies in the vicinity of $400 million. And the community is largely unaware that this crisis exists.

 

There is, in fact, a long history of somewhat toxic decision making in Framingham, which dates back at least to the years before 2000, when sage local decision makers decided to deliberately neglect water & sewer system maintenance. That came to a head in 2007, when the state intervened on the town after 50 sewage overflows occurred in one year. The state forced major infrastructure repairs, but the toxic decision making was not repaired and has been the force behind a series of further mistakes, which include: doing nothing on solar installations from 2014-2021; taxing below inflation since 2013, choking off vital revenue; neglecting the water & sewer system again, so that by 2017, the backlog of maintenance was as bad as in the state intervention years; dramatically lowering funding for road maintenance so that roads are on a major downward spiral, failing to plan for school roofs replacements, where 12 school roofs need replacement in the next few years.​

 

Add all this to the astonishing fact that $3 million/year in utility savings has been passed up, by the Mayor not adding a single solar roof or canopy in the city in 4 years, despite the great improvement in financial paybacks provided by the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022.

 

It is why I began publishing The Framingham Observer Substack newsletter, which can be viewed as a record of everything I have done to make improvements in Framingham by trying to ensure the community is well informed on what its government is doing.

 

I started out thinking I could write about 6 articles.

 

I have now clocked up 170 articles.There is also no sign that Mayor Sisitsky has any intention of addressing the increasing problems the city faces, nor of conveying to the community any idea of the the major difficulties he has helped worsen.​

 

That is why I am now running for Mayor.