Methuen mayor, School Committee divided over district budget
The city council is expected to vote on the budget on
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The impasse prompted the committee to seek an emergency injunction in Essex Superior Court Thursday to stop the mayor from consolidating the school district's IT department with the city's, one of his cost-cutting measures.
School Committee members said the district needs its own department to support student and staff devices, and that Beauregard doesn't have the authority to unilaterally combine the two departments. Beauregard, however said, he is just seeking such cuts to prevent further teacher layoffs.
'My mission here is to ensure that we limit the number of teacher layoffs to the maximum step possible,' Beauregard said. 'We simply cannot be reducing mission critical student-facing classroom positions.'
The mayor's proposed budget has also rankled parents, teachers, and students, who gathered at a recent City Hall meeting, demanding the councilors reconsider the proposed budget.
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Beauregard said his proposed budget ensures that other essential city departments, like fire and police, aren't cut.
The Methuen Education Association said the city should prioritize school funding.
'What we are doing now is just going backwards in time again, and the mayor wants to move forward, well this isn't it,' said Kara Blatt, co-president of the Methuen Education Association.
Like Methuen, school districts across Massachusetts — including Brookline, Milton, and Newton — have been
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The Methuen school district serves about 6,500 students, about two-thirds of whom are classified as high needs, meaning they are low income, English learners, or have disabilities, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
'I think my son's social development and his behavioral development is a huge part of his education as well. So I don't think any position is expendable by any means,' said John Drew, a Methuen parent who spoke out at last week's city council meeting. Drew has a son who benefited from a district special needs program for two years before integrating into the Comprehensive Grammar School.
The mayor also has proposed freezing contractual teacher raises to free up cash.
While the district has seen a declining student enrollment, losing nearly 500 students in the past decade, new
students who have been added to attendance rolls are largely high needs and require additional services that cost more, said Laurie Keegan, School Committee co-chair. Keegan said the per-student cost rose by about 25 percent from 2020 to 2023. Despite cuts to some staff positions, including 40 last year, staffing increased during the last five years to about 540 as of last school year.
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'The students that we're losing are not the students that we're gaining, all of these populations cost a lot more money to educate. So while our actual enrollment may look like it's slightly down, the per-pupil cost is actually much higher because the needs of the kids are much greater,' Keegan said.
Merging the city's IT department and other school utilities, would free up more than $800,000, Beauregard said,
and would be enough to save more than 20 teaching positions.
Parent Nicole Pereira said
she is open to the idea of consolidating the IT department if it means saving staff positions and limiting class sizes. However, she added the current IT department is already overwhelmed, and that it took months for IT to fix her fourth grade son's Chromebook.
'I just don't know how a teacher is supposed to teach all 20 plus students effectively while making sure half of those students are receiving all of their accommodations,' Pereira said.
Keegan raised doubts over how equipped the city is to handle the 7,000 plus devices in the students' one-to-one technology program. The mayor has also proposed consolidating the district's legal department, but Keegan said the district needs specialized legal counsel in working with students in special education that she believes
the city cannot provide.
State lawmakers five years ago
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Parents and teachers said there needs to be changes to the way aid is distributed, like raising the minimum funding requirement of Chapter 70, the primary state funding program for Massachusetts public schools.
'When you hear that Massachusetts has the best schools in the United States, I would really be just shocked to see what happens in other states and other schools,' Pereira said, 'because I just feel really let down with the way that people talk about what we can offer at school and how much we can be willing to take away from our schools.'
Maria Probert can be reached at
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Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.
