Budget cuts force Brookline Education Foundation to rethink mission as teachers lose training funds

Teachers in Brookline will receive significantly less funding next school year for non-mandatory professional development, leading a Brookline nonprofit that raises private funds for educators and administrators to re-evaluate the grants it provides.

The Brookline Education Foundation was founded in 1981 and has allocated more than $6 million around the district since then, for initiatives ranging from lending libraries to international trips to study ancient mathematics. But in the coming year, the nonprofit anticipates taking on a different role.

In the face of a roughly $8-million budget deficit ahead of fiscal year 2026, Brookline’s School Committee significantly slashed funding for professional development, retaining only mandated training, literacy training and essential memberships and removing funding for all training and conferences that are not part of the license-renewal process for educators.

As a result of the $367,672 cut, teachers who once went to the BEF for grants to go “above and beyond” might now seek funding to fill the gap left by the cuts for more fundamental training, according to BEF Executive Director Kim Barnum.

“Will we have as many educators even coming to us with innovative ideas when they’re not getting their basic needs met?” Barnum said in an interview with Brookline.News.

Sometimes, professional development for educators takes place in conference centers or lecture halls, in classrooms or online. For Driscoll School art teacher Olivia Reyelt and librarian Anne Reid, it happened in Costa Rica.

Reyelt and Reid spent 10 days in the central American country working with local scientists to study juvenile sea turtles. They caught, measured, tagged and released turtles in the ocean, and studied nesting turtles and hatchlings on the shore.

In the fall of 2024, the educators brought their knowledge back to Driscoll for the “year of the turtle.” Students raised two turtles, Artemis and Apollo, from hatchlings until young adulthood, then released them into the wild on June 6.

Artemis and Apollo have left a mark on the entire Driscoll School, bringing joy to students and fostering innovation among teachers, Reid and Reyelt said in an interview with Brookline.News.

“Everyone’s at their best around the turtles, because they feel like they are their caretakers, and they need to be careful and respectful of them,” Reid said.

The educators’ trip to Costa Rica is one of many BEF grants awarded to educators in the Public Schools of Brookline. Other grants supported a lending library at Brookline Early Education Program locations with books on neurodiversity and allowed educators at Brookline High School to develop curriculum about artificial intelligence and media literacy.

Like the schools’ budget, the BEF plans its grants ahead of the fiscal year, meaning funds for fiscal year 2026 — which begins on July 1 — have already been allotted. The organization gave roughly $256,000 in teacher grants, collaborative grants, system-wide grants and innovation grants, Barnum said.

But the district’s cuts pose new challenges for the foundation, which now expects to weigh funding that would plug gaps against grants that would fund additional professional development, Barnum said.

“We’ll have to have some really tough conversations about prioritizing,” she said.

Shelley Mains, a BHS librarian, is part of the multidisciplinary BEF-funded Warriors Against Misinformation team at the high school that focuses on teaching information literacy skills.

BHS does not currently have a set curriculum on media literacy, but several educators will begin to fill that gap through WAM, Mains said.

Math courses might discuss ways statistics are used and represented in media; social studies courses may focus on techniques in propaganda; and wellness courses could talk about how to discern what is reliable nutritional or fitness information, Mains said.

“This is an opportunity to be much more successful in having students graduate with skills they need,” Mains said in an interview with Brookline.News.

For Reyelt, the chance to go to Costa Rica helped add “newness” to her curriculum — and made educators excited to teach during a time when resources are growing scarce and learning can be homogenized.

“Teachers need to go to conferences and things like that, but this experiential learning for teachers allows them to foster that same kind of experiential learning in their classroom so kids can have close to the same experiences,” Reyelt said.

Teachers often encourage students to take “brain breaks” to prevent burnout, Reid said. She described this grant as a similar breath of fresh air for educators.

“Sometimes it just feels like you’re on a treadmill,” Reid said. “This just gives us an opportunity to step off and think in other directions. It’s so refreshing.”

For Mains and other educators, BEF is vital to provide the “robust” professional development that the district can no longer afford, Mains said.

In the face of the budget cuts, BEF is “really the one source of funding for Brookline educators that’s targeted toward professional growth and development,” she said.