School Committee and Teachers Union Agree to One-Year Contract Extension in Anticipation of Challenging Budget Season
By Ellen Putnam
On Tuesday night, the School Committee announced that they had come to an agreement with the Melrose Educators Union (MEU) to extend the current Unit A and Unit C contracts to June 2026. The School Committee agreed to “market adjustments” for teachers and paraprofessionals within the current pay scale, but no other changes were made to the contracts. This agreement comes as the School Committee prepares to start discussing the budget for the Melrose Public Schools (MPS) for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26), which officials already anticipate will see a number of service cuts relative to this year’s budget.
School Committee Chair Dorie Withey called the agreement an “innovative one-year deal to keep our schools uninterrupted next year in the face of enormous fiscal constraints for our city and our schools.” Melrose’s contracts for teachers and paraprofessionals (Unit A and Unit C, respectively) had been set to expire this June. The extension provides educators in these groups with a pay raise, although Melrose teachers are still paid less on average than educators in a number of surrounding districts.
The agreement includes the promise that, “if additional funding is to be received by MPS during the 2025-26 school year,” such as from a hypothetical property tax override, then both teachers and paraprofessionals “will receive additional negotiated compensation.”
Members of the MEU at last year's Victorian Fair
Photo Credit: Nancy Clover
Superintendent Adam Deleidi announced during this week’s School Committee meeting that MPS will be heading into FY26 with a $4.2 million budget deficit (for comparison, MPS is operating from a $47 million total budget for this year). The School Committee already enacted a number of service cuts ahead of this year’s budget, including laying off 13 educators, after Melrose voters rejected a property tax override proposal last June that would have raised taxes by $7.7 million.
“I want to remind people,” Deleidi said at this week’s School Committee meeting, “that numerous positions and investments were eliminated going into this year. We are currently operating with limited resources. We are struggling to attract new staff members. Any fat has already been trimmed, and any proposed cuts are going to hurt.”
School Committee member Jennifer Razi-Thomas observed that the $4.2 million figure that Deleidi will need to cut from the budget would be equivalent to laying off 62 early-career teachers, out of about 400 staff total in the district, although Deleidi clarified that not all of the cuts would be teacher positions.
“We’re doing lots of mathematical gymnastics with class sizes,” Deleidi said. “We’re prioritizing legal compliance, since if we’re not being compliant with the laws, it’s going to cost us a whole lot more.”
Deleidi shared that the cuts he is looking at may sound drastic when he announces them in the next few weeks. “As you’re hearing things you’re not going to like,” he explained, “those are there because the next thing after that is a whole lot worse. We’re looking at first grade classes at Winthrop being 29 or 30 students next year. If those class sizes go up, it’s because I don’t want to make kids change schools. And the next step after that would be closing schools, and I really don’t want to do that.”
Follow Us: