Marty Green

The Hildreth Elementary School has two new specialists joining the faculty for the 2024-25 academic year. Elizabeth Bala is taking on the role of board certified behavior analyst. Haley Lowney will serve as a special education teacher concentrating on grade 4.

Just under a quarter of Harvard's registered voters cast ballots in this year's state primary election. And only a third of those who did vote cast their ballots in person last Tuesday at the new location in the Hildreth Elementary School gymnasium. Fully two-thirds of the primary votes were mailed in or cast early at Town Hall.

Articles 11 and 12 both create new funds for use by the schools. Each would do a job that some other fund formerly did. And each new fund is intended to solve a problem that arose in the past year.

Two-hour Town Meeting passes all warrant articles by clear majorities

With inflation gradually declining, the Personnel Board voted unanimously last week to recommend a cost-of-living increase of 3.19% for the town's nonunion employees in fiscal 2026. That is the lowest such increase in four years. But the amount proposed for merit raises is substantially higher than in past years. The final decision on the increases will be up to the Select Board.

As if picking a president weren't hard enough, voters in Massachusetts on Election Day will also decide how thousands of high school students should earn their diplomas. Passage of Ballot Question 2 would end the current requirement that a student must pass the 10th-grade Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) to graduate from high school. If Question 2 is defeated, the requirement will stay in place.

Last spring, more than 400 Bromfield students answered a broad range of questions as part of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, sponsored by Emerson Hospital. The questions dealt with stress, depression, sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, self-harm, and more. Results of the survey were presented to the School Committee this week, and those results showed both some encouraging changes from past years and a few concerning trends.

Harvard voters turned out in substantial, though not record-breaking, numbers for this 2024 presidential election. Overall, 84% of the town's 4,800 registered voters cast ballots. That's down slightly from the 91% turnout rate in 2020, but still impressive compared to this year's statewide turnout of 67%.

After weeks of work by its budget subcommittee and school administrators, this week the full School Committee saw a draft of the proposed school budget request for fiscal 2026. This draft focused on the amount the schools would seek as part of the town's omnibus budget, not on the complete school budget, which includes state aid and other outside funds.

The fiscal 2026 budget request that School Committee members voted to approve last Monday was about $465,000 smaller than the budget the committee had discussed just a week before. The new school budget, while it would still require a Proposition 2½ override from voters, shows a 5.9% increase over fiscal 2025, rather than the 8.8% increase in the earlier version. The revised budget will now go to the Finance Committee for its consideration.