One missing data field in an enrollment report has had far-reaching consequences for the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School operating budget, the school committee learned this week.
The committee voted Monday to trim $646,000 from the budget’s fourth quarter, which ends June 30, in order to remedy an assessment error that would have billed four Island towns for more than their enrollment-based shares, with the other two towns paying less.
“I apologize on behalf of the whole school administration,” superintendent Richard Smith said. “I hope you’ll support this, even if it’s frustrating in the moment.”
Because the towns pay their budget shares quarterly, there’s still time to adjust the fourth-quarter invoices so that every town has paid the corrected amount before the end of the year, Mr. Smith told the committee.
“I think a good organization accepts the mistakes it makes, acknowledges those mistakes and works to rectify those mistakes, without impacting the towns additionally,” he said.
High school business manager Suzanne Cioffi said the budget cuts will not affect students directly, instead coming from contingency funds, professional development and money allocated but unspent on salaries and department costs.
The incomplete enrollment data, reported last year to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), led the state to miss about 70 students from the Edgartown and West Tisbury schools when calculating the regional high school enrollment for fiscal year 2025, which began last July 1.
The discrepancy wasn’t discovered until the town of Edgartown raised questions while reviewing the high school budget for fiscal year 2026, which has since been updated after an internal investigation turned up the error in the current fiscal year’s enrollment numbers, Mr. Smith said.
It took DESE until late July to issue corrected enrollment numbers, by which time the error in the high school budget had been compounded when district business administrator Mark Friedman opted not to use the faulty DESE numbers when calculating the town payments for FY 2026.
In doing so, Mr. Friedman unintentionally violated a new clause in the regional cost-sharing agreement that spells out exactly how to determine the three-year rolling average for enrollment from each town.
“He made an assumption because that’s how he interpreted the regional agreement, [but] it was a wrong interpretation,” Mr. Smith said.
The school district called in attorney Nancy Campany, who drafted the updated regional agreement with town and school representatives in 2023, to confirm the best way of reducing the payments for the over-assessed towns without asking for more money from Edgartown, which was under-assessed by about $90,000, and West Tisbury, which was under-assessed by about $65,000.
In order to bring every town’s FY 2025 contribution in line with the corrected enrollment numbers, the school will need to cut $645,901.37 from its fourth-quarter invoices, Mr. Friedman said.
As a result, Aquinnah will pay $32,000 less than the town expected; Chilmark will pay nearly $81,000 less; Oak Bluffs will see a $207,000 reduction and Tisbury will pay $209,000 less than planned.
Edgartown’s final bill will be reduced by nearly $96,000 and West Tisbury’s will remain unchanged, Mr. Friedman said.
The high school budget for fiscal year 2026, which begins July 1, reflects the three-year rolling average based on correct DESE enrollment numbers, Mr. Smith said.
School committee member Kathryn Shertzer lamented the need for the budget cuts, saying the data snafu likely wouldn’t have happened in a unified school district.
“Things like this are going to continue to happen,” Ms. Shertzer said. “We need to regionalize.”
Rick Mello, the high school’s director of information technology, echoed Ms. Shertzer’s concern.
“Because it’s six separate districts, we can’t all feed into one,” he said.
Mr. Friedman said there are countless similar obstacles to sharing information between schools under the current six-district system.
A new regionalization subcommittee has been formed to study the prospect of unifying the districts, with its first meeting March 19, he said.
