BROCKTON — As of May, more than 1,000 Brockton Public School students were experiencing homelessness and had been placed in shelters spread out across the state, according to school district officials.
After a statewide, pandemic-era moratorium that banned evictions and home foreclosures for Massachusetts residents expired in September 2022, roughly 600 Brockton students became homeless over the following nine months, said BPS officials.
About 490 BPS students were experiencing homelessness going into the 2022-23 school year. Once the eviction moratorium ended early in the school year, the number of homeless students rose to “a little over 1,000,” said BPS CFO Aldo Petronio at a Brockton School Committee Finance Subcommittee meeting on May 2.
“We’ve seen an increase of 125% of homeless students,” said Superintendent Mike Thomas, who went out on an extended medical leave at the same time news broke of a $14.4 million deficit discovered in last school year’s budget.
Students who become homeless can continue attending school in Brockton, but many are placed in shelters outside of the district. While some families stay in downtown Brockton’s MainSpring homeless shelter or hotels across the city, others could reside as far away as outside of Boston.
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Transportation budget was ‘not fully funded’
The state requires school districts to pick up and drop off students in elementary and middle schools at their door if they live more than two miles from school, meaning Brockton busses drive far outside the district to pick up the hundreds of students facing homelessness.
“That transportation cost is out of control and that’s not fully funded,” Thomas said at a School Committee Finance Subcommittee meeting on April 25. “Our transportation department just isn’t big enough now to do that.”
Petronio was placed on administrative leave following the discovery of the $14.4 million budget deficit from last year, which he and Thomas were informed of as early as July 2022 by BPS Assistant CFO Chris Correia. The budget deficit was announced, along with Thomas’ medical leave, after a four-hour emergency school committee meeting on Aug 31.
Did bussing costs contribute to $14.4 million deficit?
Thomas and other district officials said transportation was one area the school had overspent during fiscal year 2023, along with security and staffing.
In May, BPS laid off over 130 teachers and other staff members to cut costs to address an $18 million deficit in the budget for fiscal year 2024, which began July 1, 2023. The layoffs were primarily a result of dropping student enrollment in BPS as students flock to charter schools, private schools and other nearby districts.
In its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, BPS allocated roughly $16.2 million for its transportation budget for the current school year. District officials could not be reached when asked how many students are currently experiencing homelessness in BPS.
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Did BPS miss out on an extra $6 million?
Under Massachusetts’ Student Opportunity Act, the state provides additional funding for each low-income student enrolled in the district. Each year, the state uses student enrollment data from Oct. 1 to determine each district’s “foundation enrollment.”
If at least 80% of a district’s student body is classified as low-income, that district qualifies for “Group 12,” which provides the highest amount of funding per low-income student.
On Oct. 1, 2022 — when the state took enrollment data for Brockton for the 2022-23 school year — only 79.5% of the BPS student body qualified as low-income, so the district missed out on being included in “Group 12” by a measure of 69 students, totaling an approximate loss of an additional $6 million for last year.
After the eviction moratorium expired in September, more and more students became homeless throughout October, November and December, but were not counted toward the state’s Student Opportunity Act funding total.
“Most of them will qualify for the low-income so we could get to Group 12,” Thomas said. “Not all of them do, unfortunately.”
