At a recent School Committee meeting, Superintendent Dr. Josh Vadala shared that he and Chief Financial Officer Samuel Rippin have created what is being called Draft Zero, which is a preliminary draft of the Fiscal Year 2027 budget.
“We took last year’s voted budget, that was voted in June (2025), and we took all the salaries and all the information that we have, and basically created a document that would be with the pay raises and everything based on the people that we had voted on last year,” Vadala said.
He continued, “That starts our first draft. We call it Draft Zero because it’s not necessarily reflective of what we actually have. So now we’re in the process of going through all of the names and (checking to see) if there were any moves or any things that had to shift, and we’ll update that.”
Vadala said he anticipates that Draft One will be ready at the next School Committee meeting, which will be held on Feb. 10. He added that he is anticipating Gov. Maura Healey to put out the first draft of House One, the state’s bill for the fiscal year, which will include Chapter 70 information and net school spending, next week.
“That will all be on the agenda for the next School Committee meeting, and then we’ll be able to talk about what we anticipate getting from the state, what our level service budget would look like for next year, if there’s a disconnect, and then we start scheduling the meetings where we bring in our principals and our department heads,” Vadala said.
He added, “We are very much close to being able to share publicly, you know, that beginning of the process, and we anticipate that for the next meeting — and it coincides nicely with the governor’s budget coming out, and we’ll have that at least sort of as a line in the sand for our first target number.”
