Swampscott officials said they would meet in May or June to write shared financial rules for the school budget after an April 8 dispute exposed the town’s central budget problem: the schools are the largest expense, but the elected School Committee sets the budget’s bottom line largely on its own, while the Select Board, Finance Committee and Town Meeting answer for the tax bill.
The immediate conflict was the Nahant revolving fund, which routes the tuition Nahant pays to send its students to Swampscott schools straight into the school budget. The account had grown from essentially zero a few years earlier to about $164,000 to $574,000 by last September, even as the town was reaching into unused levy capacity to balance the budget.
The promised working session would bring together the town’s three budget chairs: Select Board chair Katie Phelan, Finance Committee chair Eric Hartmann and School Committee chair Glenn Paster, with the town administrator and superintendent. At the April 8 Select Board meeting, officials said they would set guidelines for free cash, excess-levy use and the Nahant account so it “is more well-regulated, so that we don’t end up in this situation again.” Town Administrator Nick Connors called the policy “a definite.”
The May/June timeframe was put on the record by the board’s outgoing vice chair, who left the Select Board at the April 28 election. Phelan is the Select Board’s seat at the tri-chair table, but she abstains on the school budget votes themselves because her spouse teaches at the middle school.
There is no record in the available materials that the session has happened or produced a policy. The test, if it does, is whether the policy caps the excess-levy draw and sets a ceiling on the Nahant balance, or merely describes current practice. A cap would change the FY29 math. A description would not.
Schools are the largest budget pressure
Depending on how they are counted, the schools make up between roughly a third and two-thirds of town spending. The direct School Committee line is about 34–36% of the budget. Add school employees’ health insurance and the buildings’ insurance, which are carried on the town side of the ledger, and the all-in figure reaches roughly two-thirds.
Both numbers are true. That is why residents hear some officials say schools are cannibalizing the budget and others deny it.
The pressure is not a claim of waste. It is that the schools are the biggest line, and they grow. Special-education costs are the structural driver. As this paper reported on May 13, Connors’s five-year projection runs the town’s excess-levy cushion, the gap between what Swampscott is allowed to tax and what it does tax, to exhaustion by FY29. The projected shortfall was “just under 500[,000],” and a board member said, with Connors agreeing, that “very technically… we’d actually need an override” to cover it.
That forecast holds school growth to 3.25% a year, the most sensitive assumption in the projection.
The school budget is one line
Four public bodies touch the school budget:
- The School Committee builds and adopts the school budget’s bottom line and hires and evaluates the superintendent.
- Town Meeting appropriates that budget as one up-or-down line, not item by item.
- The Select Board sets town-side policy and signs off on the use of excess levy.
- The Finance Committee reviews every appropriation and recommends. It does not vote anything into law.
Select Board member Wayne Spritz put the structure plainly at the March 27 candidates’ debate. With no separate school tax, he said, “the school committee gets to define their budget and it becomes one line item that we vote up or down,” so “the fiduciary responsibility… does not reside in the school committee. [It] resides in the select board and in town meeting, and in the finance committee.”
The board that sets the school number is not the same board that answers to taxpayers for the full bill.
Residents also have limited records to review. The School Committee posts no minutes or transcripts of its meetings, and the Finance Committee posts agendas but, in practice, no minutes. For school-side detail, residents depend on the press or on attending in person.
The $574,000 Nahant account
Select Board member Mary Ellen Fletcher, who is also the board’s liaison to the Finance Committee, wanted the Nahant cash applied to the budget. Leaving it in “an account while we’re reaching into our unused levy,” she said, “is insane to me.”
Her narrower objection was that no codified policy limits the account balance. The fund was set up so Nahant’s payments “wouldn’t have to go through a town meeting approval,” she said, and “there was never a discussion about how much money should be in that account.”
Superintendent Jason Calichman defended the balance. The fund covers staff salaries over the summer “when there’s not student in the building,” he said, and zeroing it out would be bad planning: “we will be coming to you for way more if we zero it out.”
Calichman said spending down the account helped the schools lower their FY27 request: “the way we were able to go from 4.4% — that was originally our number — to 3.25 in large part was because we are spending down the account.”
Calichman agreed, though, that the schools “should have a financial policy about the funds.”
The Select Board made no change to the appropriation that night. The disagreement moved to the promised policy session.
The table has changed
The School Committee entering those talks has a new chair and two members elected after last year’s budget fight.
In December 2025, longtime chair Amy O’Connor, for a decade the committee’s strongest pro-funding voice, resigned both the chair and her seat. She cited “misinformation, mistrust and persistent negative commentary on social media” and wrote that “the prospect of fighting through another budget season is beyond my energy level.” Vice chair Glenn Paster, who said he was tempted to “go scorched earth” but that “Amy deserved better,” succeeded her, acting from December and formally early in 2026.
At the April 28 election, Martha Cesarz, a 17-year Swampscott teacher and former school administrator, won O’Connor’s unexpired seat, which runs to 2028. Cesarz ran on respecting “difference of opinion,” saying residents should be able to ask budget questions “without being told that they’re not supporting the school.” She also said that, after spending “so many hours trying to find out information about the school budget,” she wants to make that information easier to find.
Katie Arrington, elected the same day, brings Finance Committee experience to the School Committee. The charter bars holding both seats at once, but her election gives the School Committee a member with direct experience on the finance board.
Records to watch
Three things are checkable over the coming year, if the records appear.
First, whether the tri-chair session happens and produces a rule that caps rather than merely describes. Second, whether FY28 budgeting holds the schools at 3.25% and begins preparing voters for an override ask. Third, whether the School Committee, whose newest member campaigned on making budget information easier to find, starts posting the minutes it does not now post.
Sources: April 8, 2026 Select Board meeting (F9gmYU1kcoQ): five-year projection and FY29 exchange [1:16:03, 1:25:01–1:25:30]; Nahant revolving-fund discussion, Fletcher and Calichman [1:34:53–1:45:18]; tri-chair May/June commitment and Connors “a definite” [1:39:52–1:40:40, 1:44:25–1:45:18]. March 27, 2026 Select Board candidates’ debate (NZltd0P5RMw): Spritz on the single-line school budget and fiduciary responsibility [45:24–46:15]; speaker tags in this meeting reassign between segments, so the Spritz attribution follows content and prior published coverage. Spring 2026 School Committee candidates’ forum (6QcvKzGNwJY): Cesarz [3:11–4:07, 6:38–7:18, 18:44–19:20, 23:08–25:00]. The April 8 transcript reuses numeric speaker tags and reassigns them mid-meeting; quotes are attributed via the professional analysis speaker map (data/analysis_markdown_prof/F9gmYU1kcoQ.md), not raw tags. Speaker 2 = Phelan, Speaker 3 = the vice chair, Speaker 5/6 = Fletcher, Speaker 1 = Connors, Speaker 8 = Finance Director Patrick Luddy. The Nahant skeptic who said “insane to me” and “I am the one who’s been asking” is the same person, Fletcher. O’Connor’s December 2, 2025 resignation and letter language are from her person file and press (Itemlive, Patch, Swampscott Tides, Dec. 2025), not the April 2026 transcripts; Paster’s “scorched earth”/“Amy deserved better” quotes likewise. The ~34–36% direct school line and ~68% all-in framing is established in prior coverage and earlier Town Meeting records, not these three transcripts. Canonical names and roles from data/people/ (amy-oconnor, glenn-paster, katie-arrington, katie-phelan) and data/committees/finance-committee/_committee.md; “Cesarz” and “Calichman” are corpus- and press-attested spellings (transcripts render them phonetically). The School Committee posts no minutes or transcripts and the Finance Committee posts agendas but, as of mid-May 2026, no minutes (data/committees/finance-committee/_committee.md). Prior coverage: 2026-05-13_fy29-override.md, 2026-05-30_candidate-trail-consensus.md.