Establishing a Stabilization Fund at a Regional Vocational School in Massachusetts

State regulation, in  Reality, Crazy Massachusetts permits local faculties, along with nearby vocational-technical colleges, to establish a Stabilization Fund for capital initiatives. The governing statute is Massachusetts General Laws c. Seventy-one, §sixteen G½.

Not all local colleges have attempted to create this sort of Stabilization Fund. This article is written to help those who choose to strive.

From my reveal, the method is straightforward but can also be long and aggravating.

Here are the fundamental steps to observe:

1. Educate Yourself. Read the regulation. Talk to others who have long passed through the technique. Ask questions. Contact me. Reach out to your professional association. The Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS) and Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA) are tremendous sources. Talk with your school business manager to ensure you are united on this. It would help if you marched together. Ensure that everybody is privy to the start and that applying cash from the Stabilization Fund isn’t always easy. Any money located in this type of Stabilization Fund can also need only to be used for capital initiatives and will be utilized by a vote of two-thirds of the local School Committee. It isn’t a piggy financial institution to be opened at will through the School Business Manager or Superintendent

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2. Educate Your School Committee. If you’ve got a Finance or Budget Subcommittee, that is probably the first-rate place to begin. Talk with the Subcommittee chair first to ensure there may be the least standard useful resource for the idea. Then, it is supplied to the entire Subcommittee. Make a presentation. Let them ask questions until they cannot think about it anymore. (The questions are identical; you may pay interest from town and town officials later.) Once you’ve reached a robust consensus at the Subcommittee, ask that corporation to recommend the complete School Committee.

Three. Seek a Vote from Your School Committee. Once you’ve got a guide from the Subcommittee that handles coin topics, locate the Agenda object for the complete School Committee. In the assembly package deal, embody a memo outlining why you want to establish a Stabilization Fund. In the memo, address any predominant issues raised at the Subcommittee level. Remember that it’s incredibly probable that your memo will discover its manner in the arms of mayors and selectmen in your district. Make effective its miles strictly real. Make sure all later correspondence to your member communities makes use of identical or very comparable language.

Four. Notify Your Member Communities of the Vote. After your School Committee votes to set up a Stabilization Fund, the laugh starts. Now, you want to mobilize and assist most of your member groups. If you have nine member organizations, you want superb votes from 5 of them. If you’ve got 18 member organizations as I did, you want an effective vote from 10. The first step is to inform the Boards of Selectmen and City Councils in your district of your School Committee’s vote. Make sure nice mayors and town managers are notified, too.

Here’s a part of the letter we sent to our 18 member corporations:

“On January 2, 2013, the District School Committee at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School voted to set up a Stabilization Fund in line with the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws c. Seventy-one, §16 G½. The law calls for district groups to be notified and voted on to approve the motion with the School Committee’s useful resource.

The Monty Tech School Committee requests that an editorial be placed on an upcoming Town Meeting Warrant/City Council Agenda to seek approval to install the Stabilization Fund.

We recommend the following wording:

That the Town/City of ______________vote to approve the popularity quo of a Stabilization Fund consistent with Massachusetts General Laws c.Seventy-one, §sixteen G½ for the Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School District.

Five. Educate Your Member Communities. Use the letter to member groups as an opportunity to offer a reason for why you are making your request.

We brought this:

“Stabilization Funds are commonplace inside the route of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the towns and towns at some stage in our vicinity. Most, if not all, of our 18 district agencies have carried out Stabilization Funds for decades.

Monty Tech wishes to set up a Stabilization Fund to assist in dealing with its many capital desires. As you can see, the district maintains and often updates a Five-Year Capital Plan, which identifies our faculty district’s predominant structural and system desires. While we do our best to update school facilities and devices and stretch every greenback via college and pupil exertions, we have determined that the charge variety allotted for capital tasks in our annual price range isn’t sufficient to meet the district’s wishes.

We accept as actual that putting in a Stabilization Fund is fiscally prudent.”

6. Expect Questions, Rejection, and Delays. The school district is crafted from 18 member businesses, which include two cities and 16 cities. We were invited to speak to the Board of Selectmen, Finance Committee, Financial Advisory Board, or City Council in many groups. In others, we heard nothing. In the one’s times, I bet our letter explaining the Stabilization Fund changed into enough. The elected officers within the one community sincerely voted to address the Town Meeting Warrant problem. In 5 of the Towns, however, no longer whatever took place the least bit. They either intentionally left the matter of the Town Meeting Warrant or forgot to position it. We entertained many questions in one community, and I wrote a letter that clarified our characteristics.

7. Expect Some Unfair Questions and Comments. During our meetings, we heard severa unfair questions, some of which seemed designed virtually to disappoint us. They by no means did. But you want to be prepared. The period of this text prevents me from going into the splendid element. Still, the questions fell into five most crucial training: the functionality duration of the Stabilization Fund, concerns about unmet capital desires at municipal college districts, claims that approving a Stabilization Fund would possibly robotically bring about multiplied exams to member communities, guidelines that a Stabilization Fund is something “new” or “unique,” and claims that the vocational college seemed so appropriate it failed to want any capital enhancements. Finally, we heard the extraordinarily unfair and inflammatory word “slush fund” tossed around greater than as soon as. Be organized to cope with those issues. By reading the regulation and noting the extreme obstacles to using a Stabilization Fund, you ought to be organized.

8. Don’t Give Up. When we commenced the Monty Tech approval method, the first actual vote from a community turned into a rejection. To make topics worse, the vote grows to be unanimous. And it became our 2nd biggest network. The Budget Subcommittee Chair and School Business Manager took the defeat badly. I became dissatisfied with the direction but knew we had 17 exceptional possibilities to get ten votes in our preference. We confirmed up for a Town Meeting on a Saturday morning to discover that the Finance Committee had voted no longer to consultant approval in every other network. Again, I was disappointed; however, I was not defeated. When allowed to speak at the Town Meeting, I thanked the townspeople for helping our school and reminded them that their Town had a Stabilization Fund. Their municipal faculty district had the chance to tap from time to time. We didn’t. In the stop, the Town Meeting voted solidly in our preference over the city’s Finance Committee’s objections.

9. Celebrate Your Success. In our case, the School Committee voted 17-1 to set up a Stabilization Fund. That vote happened on January 2, 2013. Our 9th and 10th incredible votes from member groups were secured – separated in time by just three minutes on the night of June 18, 2013. We did now not exactly pop open any champagne. However, we did congratulate each other on accomplishing the fulfillment. We observed it as another small step to enhance our ability to respond quickly to our college’s small- or medium-duration capital desires. It’s a small step that you can take with some planning and some painting.

10. Spread the News and Help Others. Though no longer required through the statute, we notified the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education of the vote focused on the aid of our School Committee and the names of the ten groups that supported us and the dates they cast those votes. Moreover, I testified in Boston on an invoice that could simplify how Stabilization Funds are created and asked questions from one or other democrats looking to install a Stabilization Fund.

Steven C. Sharek is a veteran school administrator. He has served as an Assistant Dean of Academic Services at Southern New England School of Law (now UMass School of Law—Dartmouth), as a Superintendent-Director at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School, and as a Cluster Coordinator and Communications/Grants Manager at Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School. He holds a B.A. in English, a Master’s in Education, and a Doctorate. He has been an energetic Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA) member.