At the town manager’s budget presentation to the Selectboard on Monday, December 15, residents will have an opportunity to ask Duxbury Public School Superintendent Danielle Klingaman the questions raised in this story.

This spring, the town plans to try for a second override in two years, one that includes a 4.83% increase in the school budget. That override budget barely made it out of the School Committee and has yet to be endorsed by the Finance Committee. A previous story on these matters has been updated.

The meeting will take place in the Mural Room at Town Hall or via Zoom, starting at 6:30 p.m.

December 14, 2025 (Duxbury) — During this year’s budget season, Superintendent Danielle Klingaman has provided some odd answers to how the school system has addressed falling enrollment.

At a time when the Duxbury Public Schools have near record high staffing levels and the lowest enrollment in 18 years, Klingaman appears to be using faulty data to overstate the extent of the district’s needs. The resulting exaggerations appear designed to support a Proposition 2.5 override that may not be necessary.

Klingaman’s attempt to obscure the significance of near record-low student-teacher ratios is one example of such misrepresentations. In 2008, the district’s enrollment was 3,391 students but by 2025, that enrollment had fallen to 2,694 students, a decline of 697 students or 20.5% of the student body. Meanwhile, the student-teacher ratio had fallen from 15.6 to 11.2, a decline that represents a significant increase in the amount of resources the town has devoted to education.

Student-teacher ratios show the amount of resources that are available to students over time. Some residents, however, have taken this data to mean that their children should be in classes of about 11 to 12 students, but some elementary classrooms have 23 students.

On November 25, the Finance Committee asked Klingaman to explain to the public why the student-teacher ratio was different than class size. As educational professionals are aware, the student-teacher ratio is the number of students per teacher. It is not the same as class size because teachers do not teach all day long. Others, like special education teachers, focus on certain topics or functions.

Instead of explaining the nuances of the calculations, Klingaman blamed the state for deceiving the public.

State reporting can be a little bit deceiving. And also different school districts interpret that state reporting differently in terms of um how they do.

We have lunch and recess assistants that just do lunch and recess here in Duxbury. They get counted in our ratio. Even though they’re only here for a portion of the day, so those numbers do not always um teach.

She also said that the state counts math tutors, instructional assistants, and occupational therapists as teachers.

That’s not true.

The student-teacher ratio only counts teachers, not all employees or all educators, as teachers.

Klingaman’s answer also doesn’t make sense mathematically. In 2025, Duxbury had a student-teacher ratio of 11.2-to-1. If that ratio included all staff members, then Duxbury Public Schools would only have had 240.5 total staff members in 2025. Budget documents list 430.09 FTEs (full-time equivalent employees).

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Her answer is problematic because it shifts focus away from the question of whether she is doing a good job managing her current resources.

For example, a point of particular concern for parents is the student-teacher ratio in the third grade where there are at least two classes with 23 students.

One way to decrease the class sizes in these schools would be to fund two new elementary school positions, as Klingaman has proposed. Another way to address the issue would be to decrease the number of electives in the middle and high school in order to make it easier to schedule classes. Does the town really need to pay for five different language offerings (ESL, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Latin)?

Which choice meets the district’s strategic goals: lower class sizes in the elementary schools or offering five languages in the high school?

Instead of confronting these difficult choices, Klingaman simply reverted to exaggerating the extent of her resource crunch.

Klingaman has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Two other questions about staffing data also raise questions about whether town residents have enough reliable data to support an override.

Question 1: How many staff positions (FTEs) did the Duxbury Public Schools lose from last year to this year?

During the presentation to the School Committee on Wednesday, December 10, Business Director Lisa Freeley referenced 24.9 staff cuts due to the override and for adjustment to enrollment, Vice Chair Matt Gambino mentioned 19 as a result of the override.

Freeley’s presentation also listed a total of 417 current FTEs for FY26.

Since there were 430.09 FTEs in FY25, it is hard to understand why there was a 24.9 reduction in the number of staff members from FY25 to FY26 because 430.09 minus 417 is 13.09, not 24.9.

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November 6, 2025 (Duxbury) — At a recent Duxbury Finance Committee meeting, committee member Al Hoban said that he did not want to criticize anyone over the school department’s November 5 budget presentation. The superintendent and business director had done a great job. The presentation was well-prepared. It was just, well…

The budget presentation did not start off with what I was expecting to be a straightforward representation of where the 5A budget would be with respect to their facts. Instead, it began with a request to restore, I think, 8.9 FTEs1 (full-time equivalent employees) that were lost in the prior year. I could understand that, but I didn’t expect the emotional content, because it set a tone for the meeting.

As the town gears up for the second override request in two years, Superintendent Danielle Klingaman has been pushing her budget to the School Committee, the Finance Committee, and at public fora. The November 5 presentation to the School Committee appeared to be the first time Hoban along with fellow committee members Ted Flynn and Ashley Maher had seen the budget.

The town is trying to a do better job with its budget this year, but it’s not clear Klingaman’s on board with their approach. After last year’s $5.8 million override failed, the town was left with a Proposition 2.5 budget that cut public safety services. Since the Selectboard refused to fix the problem, residents (advised by me) organized a Citizens’ Petition to transfer money from the town’s Stabilization Fund to provide level service funding to the police and fire departments. A June Special Town Meeting then approved the transfer.

To avoid a similar debacle this year, the Selectboard has instructed departments to set their priorities in their Article 5A non-override budget before putting their extra requests in their Article 5B override budget.

To date, Danielle Klingaman, the superintendent of Duxbury Public Schools, has all but ignored the instructions, perhaps because doing so would mean constructing a 5A budget that everyone can live with — something she clearly doesn’t want.

Instead, she has focused on emotional appeals while also insisting that residents should not look too closely at how she is spending money.

At the November 5 presentation, she even discouraged residents from analyzing the district’s staffing needs.

If we continue to operate with an underfunded budget, the quality of education in Duxbury will decline. Right now, we are band-aiding the impact with what happened with the override failure last year.

As we shared at the last School Committee meeting, we lost many excellent teachers and administrators during last year’s budget crisis. And this will happen again if we start to pick apart FTEs and operate with minimal staffing, which is causing burnout and frustration with the employees we have left who are picking up the responsibilities of these unfilled positions. There will be a slow erosion over time which we are already experiencing, and it’s not a cliff, but it’s a slow erosion of the services that we know we need to be able to continue to function as a high quality school district.

Here’s what that sounded like.

In fact, Duxbury has had excellent, highly regarded schools for decades, all without the funding levels seen this year or last. ln 2025, the Duxbury Public Schools had what was almost certainly the most generously funded budget in at least the last half century. This year, even after cuts, the district has what is likely the second most generously funded budget in that time period.

Klingaman is correct about one thing, however: If residents look closely at staffing levels, they will find areas to cut. Even after last year’s reduction in force, staffing levels are near record highs.

In FY2025, the Duxbury Public Schools had a student-teacher ratio of 11.2, the lowest number recorded in the last 21 years of available data. This year the ratio is estimated to be 11.4, the second lowest number in that time period. All indications are that the student-teacher ratio has not been this low since at least the early seventies.

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October 28, 2025 (Duxbury) — Many Duxbury residents can probably agree with Finance Committee Chair Betsy Sullivan that the second proposed override in two years is a very sad disturbing process to go through.

Sullivan made that comment at a budget discussion held at Monday’s Selectboard meeting.

For Sullivan, the budget process is sad and disturbing because people won’t give her the money she demands. For those who voted against the override last year, the process is sad and disturbing because the town hasn’t listened to anything anyone said when they voted no.

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Opponents wanted the town to tighten up operations, especially the town’s ridiculously large, overpaid human resources department. Instead of figuring out how to be more efficient, town officials have spent most of the last year endlessly complaining that they don’t have enough money.

Those complaints do not extend to Human Resources Director Jeannie Horne, however. Even though Duxbury supposedly faces austerity, she awarded herself another gigantic pay raise of $8,086 for fiscal year 2026.

Now she and the town are asking for more money and more staff for fiscal year 2027.

None of it makes any sense.

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