Here are the posted open, public Southborough committee and board meetings for this week* along with my selected highlights from the agendas.
It’s looking like a very quiet week. But, as always, be aware that changes to the meeting schedule (and agendas) are known to happen throughout the week. (Scroll down for details on any meetings that popped up after last Monday’s post.) For an updated list of meetings, visit the Town website.
These days, most (but not all) meetings, can be participated in, watched live, and replayed from home.)**
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
- Board of Assessors Meeting, 4:15 pm @ DPW Meeting Room (agenda) Agenda Highlights: Elect officers; sign excise tax abatements; Sign contract for AP-5 and Axis GIS integration (CAI Technologies); Update on newly taxable property and cyclical inspections
Friday, May 29, 2026
- Select Board Meeting, 8:30 am @ zoom only (agenda with packet) Agenda Highlights: Appointment of Joseph Lindberg as Probationary Officer for Southborough Police Department
Looking Back:
Below are meetings from last week that were posted after I ran last week’s list:
Thursday, May 21, 2026
- Planning Board Meeting, 2:00 pm (agenda and packet, video) Agenda Highlights: Letter of Support for One Stop Grant Application – Letter of Support for 495/Route 9 Gateway Initiative by Westborough & Southborough
Friday, May 22, 2026
- Affordable Housing Trust Meeting, 9:00 am (agenda, video not posted yet) Agenda Highlights: Discuss potential financing, housing strategies, and parcels for acquisition
*I don’t list meetings that are only closed Executive Sessions unless the agenda indicates the possibility of some action in an open public session at the opening or closing of the meeting.
**Details on watching meetings remotely:
- Town Committee/Board Meetings:
- If in-person meetings don’t also advertise a zoom option, assume that it won’t be broadcast or captured on video.
- To remotely participate in meetings that allow zoom, click here.
- To live stream (or view later) remote or hybrid meetings (even those covered by Southborough Access Media) over the internet, use the Town’s YouTube Channel for Remote Meetings. (The meetings covered by SAM can also be streamed on their website here, and eventually on SAM’s YouTube Channel.)
- Cable Access — Southborough Access Media broadcasts the regular evening meetings for the Select Board, Planning Board, and Zoning Board of Appeals that take place in the Town House Hearing Room. (Those meetings will still allow zoom participation.) View SAM’s live and replayed broadcasts via their Government cable access channel (Verizon-37 and Charter-194).
- School Committee Meetings:
- Subcommittee meetings and some special meetings are only available to attend/view live (in person or by “webinar”) with no later rebroadcast.
- Regular Southborough School Committee meetings are generally broadcast live by Southborough Access Media here and on Verizon-37 and Charter-192. (Video replays are also usually made available through their YouTube channel within a couple of days.)
- Regular Regional School Committee meetings (or Combined meetings based at Algonquin) are live broadcast by Northborough Cable Access here and YouTube channel, and on Southborough’s Education Channel (Verizon-29 and Charter-194). The meetings are also eventually rebroadcast and available on demand through NCAT’s VideoOnDemand player and YouTube (though that can take several days).
- Other:
- Southborough does participate in some regional collaboratives hosted in other towns. Those committees follow their own rules and may not offer a way to re-watch zoom meetings.
Has the school committee requested a report/study as to what the anticipated student population is for the next 10 to 20 years? Please note that Boston and Brockton are planning to lay off more than one thousand teachers due to the shrinking population of students entering the school systems. It would be a shame to build empty and overly large schools with no students and teachers.
They contracted for two special enrollment studies but not 20 years out, since the data is considered unreliable the further out you go. Because they were conducted in the 202-2021 school year, thos studies only projected through the 2030-2031 school year.
You can read those here and here.
However, NESDEC also does provide an annual updated enrollment forecast. That most recent forecast from October includes projections through 2035-36. You can read that on page 254 of the November meeting packet here.
The School Committee meetings also include an updated enrollment status report. You can read the one from this month’s meeting on page 14 of the packet here.
In comparing the data, I found that the actual enrollments for this year were 8-9% higher than the consultants had predicted they would be back in 2020-2021.
Beth
I would like to challenge the idea that a school population forecast beyond 10 years is “unreliable”. Indeed, I believe relying on a 10-year forecast when considering a major building program is in itself unreliable.
First, there is nothing wrong with using a 10-year forecast for operational considerations such as staffing or equipment plans. In this case the actions and the forecast are well aligned and using such a forecast is a good managerial practice.
However, relying on a 10-year forecast to understand a trend when contemplating the construction of a 50+ year asset is not appropriate in this case. I want to make it clear that I do not disagree with the 10 years forecasts that NSDEC or the other demographers did. I think their work is solid. However, focusing on a 10-year trend masks some longer term demographic trends that drive the overall picture. There are 2 underlying population trends that, when added together, each have impacts well beyond the 10-year time frame (demographics are like that). The first is the lingering impact of the baby boom and the second is the decline in the fertility rate*.
A longer term forecast can be thought of as the sum of various demographic trends. For the purpose of this rant, it can be thought of as the sum of the impact of fertility rates and the baby boom cycle.
The impact of the baby boom continues to linger. The current increase in our school populations is substantially impacted by the baby boom. In this case, the grandchildren of the baby boom. In more formal terms, the impact of the boom can be thought of as a sine wave with a period of about 30 years and an amplitude of about 100-150 students (for a total peak to troth impact of 200-300 students). The most recent NSDEC forecast hints at this with a K-8 population troth at FY 21-22 and a peak at FY 34-35 (the forecast goes through FY 35-36). It is likely that the demographic pressure from the grandchildren of the baby boom will recede in the 15-year period after the current 10-year forecast expires.
The second trend is declining fertility rates. The US fertility rate has fallen to about 1.6 children born to each woman. This is below the 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a population without immigration. The fertility rate has been declining in the US since about 2007. This is a broad trend across the developed word with Canada, Japan, Korea and almost all of Europe in being lower than the US.
Massachusetts has one of the lowest birth rates* in the country with the most recent data indicating 46.8 births per 1000 women age 15-45 vs a US average of 53. All of this suggests a long-term decline in our school age populations.
Why does this matter? When I started looking at the demographic data, it became clear to me that it was most unlikely that we would return to the school populations of the late 90’s and early 2000’s in the foreseeable future This is the size of population that our current infrastructure was designed to handle. The second conclusion that I came to is that our current k-8 increase was likely to peak in about 10 years and then decline for about 15 years. This coincides with the timing for a major renovation of Finn in about 15 years. I believe that this is the time to carefully consider moving to a 3-school format. That is the reason I advocated for considering a less expensive renovation of Neary as it appears to me that it may not be needed as a school in the long term.
This matters for another reason. The town and its tax payers have significant other pressures that will impact our tax bills. Perhaps the biggest over the next 10 + years is the need to fully fund our pension obligations and our other post-employment obligations (OPEB). The State expects us to fully fund our pensions by 2040 and that will entail 10+% annual increases in our pension contributions to the Worcester Retirement System over the next 10 years. Combine this with our other capital needs and the budget picture is not rosy. Every dollar spent on debt and old pension obligations is a dollar that cannot be spent on teachers, police, firefighters or DPW workers. The stakes are high and we need to get the plan right. I would recommend that we ask a qualified demographer to take a look at a longer term forecast to set the table for our needs. A 30+ year capital plan should include a 30+ year estimate of how that asset will be used.
* Fertility rate is the average total number of children born to a woman. Birth rate is the number of children born in a given year to women age 15-49
I think you are spot on. The select group should delay pushing a new school or major school renovation until a qualified demographer gives the citizens a reliable forecast of our likely school population and may I also state that it is likely that political trends outside of New England will pass a federal law allowing tax dollars to follow the student to where the student wants to go to school. In the event this federal law is passed I believe based on pioneer Institute demography studies here in Mass. that a town like Southborough will lose 20% of it’s students in the public schools. This 20% will choose private and home schooling over the current public school system.