At its meeting on April 8, the Portland Board of Public Education voted to recommend a $171.7 million school budget to the City Council for the upcoming 2025-2026 school year. 

The Board’s recommended fiscal year 2026 (FY26) budget builds off a theme of “Funding our Priorities.” It is directly aligned to the priorities of the district’s new Strategic Plan: achievement, equity, whole student, people and systems. The budget includes investments to strengthen the music program at the high schools, increase rigor and support at the middle schools, enhance reading support at the elementary schools, and provide additional staffing and programmatic support for special education district-wide.

The budget would raise the school portion of property taxes by 5.33 percent ($0.42 per $1,000 of assessed value). For the owner of a median-priced home, valued at $500,000, the budget would result in an increase of $210 per year. The Board’s recommended FY26 budget now goes to the City Council, which votes to move forward its bottom line. The Council will review the budget and hold public hearings before voting in May to send it to city voters on June 10.

The budget was developed after extensive engagement with the community, staff and school leadership, including a series of public hearings.

Board Chair Sarah Lentz said, “Thank you to the Portland Public Schools community. Your involvement was vital in getting this budget to land where it is now. Your feedback made this a stronger budget and one that balances both the needs of our students and the pressure on Portland taxpayers. This budget is aligned to our Strategic Plan and makes key investments that will benefit our students, support our educators, and help our community thrive. I encourage our community to continue to support this budget by advocating for its approval at the City Council level and at the polls in June.”

Superintendent Ryan Scallon said, “As with any budget, the FY26 budget entailed some hard decisions and hard trade-offs. However, guided by our Strategic Plan, the end result is a fair proposal focused on improving student experiences and outcomes – all within a fiscally responsible framework.”

The Board’s recommended budget is $28,000 higher than the budget that the Board’s Finance Committee voted to recommend to the full Board on March 24. That budget, and the superintendent’s original budget proposal on March 4, would have increased the school share of the property tax rate by 5.3 percent, just under the 5.33 percent tax rate increase in the Board’s recommended budget.

At the time the superintendent’s and the Finance Committee’s budgets were developed, the district had not yet received notice of the cost of employee medical premiums for FY26. Those budgets estimated that medical premium expenses would climb by 6 percent, but the district recently learned that the actual increase for medical premiums will be 9.6 percent. That’s $350,969 more than was originally budgeted.

In addition, the Board voted at its April 8 meeting to approve a new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year that includes the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr as school district holidays. That ensures that students at PPS, Maine’s most diverse school district, can observe those major religious holidays with their families without having to miss school. The approximate cost of adding those two paid holidays is $65,000 per day.

The Board had the option of adding the full costs of the higher medical premiums and the two new holidays to the budget, increasing the budget’s impact on local taxpayers.

However, the Board instead opted to approve reductions in budgeted expenses to largely offset the new costs, adding just $70,000 to the budget’s bottom line. Because the Board’s Finance Committee had already lowered the superintendent’s budget proposal by about $42,000, the net increase to the Board’s recommended budget is $28,000. That boosts the budget’s impact on the tax rate from 5.3 percent to 5.33 percent, but the $210 property tax increase for the owner of a $500,000 median home would remain the same.

The reductions in the budget that the Board approved April 8 to realize savings were: reducing non-personnel costs to academics; restructuring the student enrollment process; changing to a free staff survey platform and reducing stipends in Human Resources; the elimination of the Multilingual Center’s AmeriCorps contract and adjusting two positions from full time to four and three days a week respectively; and maintaining three physical therapists as in FY25. Originally proposed for FY26 was four physical therapists (an increase of one), but the Board’s budget instead increases contracted services for physical therapy.

Highlights of the Board’s recommended FY26 budget include:

Key investments:

●      Access to Enrichment Subjects: Providing additional music teachers at Portland and Deering. That will move each school to two music teachers and also provide access to Casco Bay High School.

●      Elementary Literacy: Adding early literacy education technicians at Title I schools in kindergarten classrooms.

●      Special Education: Investing in staffing at Central Office to support programming in schools, and staffing and programming at the school level.

●      Multilingual Learners: External evaluation of the current programming to ensure the most effective instruction and funding to increase the number of staff with ESOL credentialing.

●      Early Childhood Capacity: Slight increase in staffing to prepare for the responsibility of special education services for three- and four-year-olds and the need to develop aligned district capacity.

●      Adult Education: Consultant capacity to lead evaluation and planning process for the district’s largest school, serving more than 2,000 adult learners each year.

Increased expenses:

Employee salaries: Budgeted to increase by just under 5 percent from FY25 to FY26.

Medical benefits: Increasing by 9.6 percent from FY25 to FY26. Before any adjustments in staffing, this would result in a $2.2 million increase in expenses in FY26.

Debt Service: Increasing in FY26 by $480,000.

Maine Paid Family Medical Leave program (PFML): The district’s share will be $505,000 in FY26.

Inflation: The overall costs of goods and services in the Northeast went up 3.7 percent in the past year.    

Revenues: Unlike the City, which can raise fees for parking and other services to generate revenue, the school district is not able to raise revenue and so is dependent on such revenue sources as state education aid, grants and Title 1 funds. Here are some key revenue sources for FY26:

●      Flat state funding: The state subsidy for the district is relatively flat for FY26, despite the increased needs of district students, including those with special needs and a high number of students experiencing homelessness. This is due to Portland’s increasing property values. A community’s property valuation is a key factor in the state school funding formula, and communities with a higher valuation are expected to bear a larger local share of their students’ education costs. For FY25, the Portland Public Schools received $26.21 million in state education aid and in FY26, the district’s share of state aid is $26.3 million.

●      Use of fund balance: The Portland Public Schools has built up a fund balance. The budget calls for using a little more than $3.9 million for one-time expenses to help lower the impact on property taxes while also increasing programming for students.

●      Title Funding Decreasing: Title funds, which are federal funds to school districts that assist schools with high student concentrations of poverty in meeting educational goals, are going down $604,000 or 18 percent.

In summary, for the second year in a row, the recommended FY26 budget is a comprehensive budget of all revenues and expenses, not only local funding. The recommended $171.7 million budget consists of a local budget of approximately $162.8 million and $9 million in additional funds. This budget reflects a 6 percent or $10.3 million increase compared to the $161.4 million FY25 budget.

The budget requires an investment of $127.2 million from local taxpayers. It would raise the school portion of the property tax rate by 5.33 percent ($0.42 per $1,000 of assessed value). For the owner of a median-priced $500,000 home, the budget would raise property taxes by $210 per year or $17.50 per month.

On April 29, the City Council’s Finance Committee is anticipated to review the Board’s recommended FY26 budget and take a vote to refer it to the full Council. The Council is tentatively scheduled to hold a first reading and public hearing on the budget on May 5.  The Council also is expected to hold another public hearing on May 19 and vote on that date to send the school budget to Portland voters on June 10. View the FY26 school budget materials and a budget calendar on the district’s website HERE.

Watch the April 8 public hearing and Board vote on the FY26 school budget.

The Portland Public Schools is Maine’s largest school district, with nearly 6,500 students, and it’s also the most diverse. About one-third of the district’s students come from homes where languages other than English are spoken—a total of 59 languages. Approximately 47 percent of the district’s students are white and 53 percent are students of color. More than half of all PPS students are economically disadvantaged.