Editorial Staff

As Amherst School Board members prepare to renegotiate the teachers’ contract, residents have an opportunity to examine how compensation, benefits, and staffing decisions affect both educational outcomes and local property taxes. This article explores the major cost drivers in the current agreement and argues for a better balance between supporting educators and ensuring long-term fiscal sustainability.

In March of this year, Superintendent Mike Berry published a brief update on SAU39 educational performance. He again committed to increasing educational performance and maximizing taxpayer return on investment. That relationship between educational performance (outcomes) and taxes paid for education (investment) is known as Educational Value. We thought we'd take a closer look at both sides of that equation. Superintendent Berry compared SAU39 to state averages. Given the very high annual...

A longstanding stated core value of SAU39 is that we attend to the whole student. This translates into measuring student progress across three areas: academics, functional skills, and social-emotional learning (SEL). To do so requires tracking a balanced set of metrics that reflect both traditional academic achievement and the development of crucial life skills. Below are some metrics that are often used for each category: 1. Academic Progress: To assess academic progress, schools focus on...