Chelsea students went back to school this year with about 50 fewer adults in the building. Reading coaches, counselors, special education staff and classroom teachers are gone, cut to close a budget gap that the district put at $8.6 million before the city found more money.
The reason is not complicated, and it is not the schools’ fault. Chelsea lost 350 students. Enrollment fell from 6,100 in October 2024 to 5,749 a year later, and in Massachusetts, money follows children. Fewer children, less state aid. The district expects to lose another 220 this year.
What it took to get the city’s attention
The first public hearing never happened. On March 12, so many people turned up at City Hall that police and fire declared the council chambers over capacity and shut it down before a word was spoken.
“I have been involved with the schools for 17 years and had never seen that amount of people turn out for public comment,” School Committee Chair Ana Hernandez said.
They moved it to Chelsea High School on March 17. It ran from 6:32 p.m. to 10:16 p.m. Seventy-seven people spoke.
Superintendent Almudena G. Abeyta did not dress it up. “The budget shortfall we are facing means that valued colleagues, people who care deeply about our students, are losing their jobs,” she told the room.
Teachers union vice president Vanessa Mendoza-Mercado: “In my 10 years working in this district, we have never seen budget cuts this large.” Union president Kathryn Anderson spelled out what families would feel: “Class sizes will be going up, case loads will be going up. Everybody’s job descriptions will be changing.”
The day after that hearing, City Manager Fidel Maltez found another $2 million.
“We heard our community loud and clear and we are acting accordingly,” he said.
It brought the city’s total increase to $4 million and cut the gap to $6.6 million. It brought back 18.5 teaching positions, five paraprofessionals and the assistant principal at Chelsea Opportunity Academy.
That is worth sitting with. Nearly 19 teaching jobs came back after a room full of parents, students and teachers refused to go home quietly. Turning up worked. It is the clearest argument anyone in this city could make for showing up to the next one.
The numbers behind the cuts
The district’s own budget presentation put $6,850,000 in school-based reductions against $1,762,000 at district level, totalling $8,612,000. That was what remained after a $2,388,000 increase in Chapter 70 aid and required contribution, and the city’s money.
Staffing is 80 percent of the school budget, and school-based educators alone are 73 percent of it. Once a gap gets past a certain size, there is nowhere to cut that is not a person in front of children.
Compare last year: a $1,308,500 shortfall, closed entirely at district level, with nothing taken from schools. This year, $6,850,000 came out of schools. That is the difference between a tight year and a bad one.
In fairness to the district, not every reduction was a layoff. Two special education translator posts were never filled. A REACH director position was vacant. A Braille service was listed as no longer needed. Other savings came from maintenance, out-of-district tuition and contracts. Administrative posts went too, including a human resources specialist, a budget administrator, a business office clerk and a technology webmaster.
But the $6.85 million school-based figure is the real thing, and everyone who spoke at that hearing knew it.
Why Chelsea gets hit hardest
Chapter 70 aid follows enrollment, and English learners carry extra weight in the formula. That sounds technical. What it means is that a city like ours, where a large share of students are learning English, loses more money per departing child than a wealthier district would.
We are not alone. Everett lost 399 students. Lynn lost 487. Revere lost 331. Across Massachusetts, about 14,600 students disappeared from public schools in a single year, and 46 percent of them were English learners.
Abeyta named three causes: immigration enforcement, the cost of living, and falling birth rates. School Committee member Sarah Neville said federal immigration agents had been active in the city and seen near school buildings.
Nobody has measured how much of the loss belongs to which cause, and schools do not ask children about immigration status, so nobody can. Lynn Superintendent Molly Cohen put the honest version of it: districts cannot directly attribute the drops, but they can see fear, and they can see instability.
Anyone who lives here can fill in the rest.
What the state sent
The House created a $10 million reserve for districts losing multilingual learners unexpectedly. The final budget funded it at $4 million, split among every district in that position. Chelsea asked for what the superintendent called a one-time soft landing payment.
Statewide Chapter 70 rose to $7.658 billion, up 4 percent. Chelsea’s share of that increase did not come close to covering what it lost.
Where this goes
Chelsea’s total budget for the year is $272,378,292: $116,129,801 for the city and $156,248,491 for schools. The council approved it in June.
Maltez has been blunt that this is not a one-year problem. Employee healthcare premiums rose $1 million year over year. Debt owed to the regional vocational school and charter schools rose $4 million. Neither is going down.
The School Committee approved the budget 5 to 1, with three members recorded as present. Voting yes: Katherine Cabral, Lucia Henriquez, Claryangeliz Covas Caraballo, Mayra Balderas and Ana Hernandez. Voting no: Shawn O’Regan. Recorded present: Jake Small, Sarah Neville and Jonathan Gomez-Pereira.
Next year the district expects 220 fewer students again. The math that produced this year’s cuts has not changed, and the people who filled Chelsea High School in March will need to fill it again.