Public Schools of Brookline Superintendent Linus Guillory is under intense pressure as the school district faces a deep budget crisis and proposed sweeping cuts in services ranging from the performing arts to classroom instructional aides.
As the district and School Committee wrestle with alleged financial mismanagement leading to gaps in special education services, and a projected $8.2 million budget deficit for next year, some members of the school community have pointed a finger at Guillory.
The School Committee, which has publicly backed Guillory to this point, is increasingly divided on his performance, members told Brookline.News, with several saying the buck stops at the top and at least one believing Guillory is dealing well with challenges facing school districts across the state. As a high-profile outside audit of school finances looms, Guillory’s future appears uncertain, despite a contract that runs until 2029.
At the School Committee’s last meeting, Brookline High School parent Masha Kogan called on the committee to “be unafraid to lay blame for this crisis where it belongs, which is at the top.”
“The School Committee, and I believe only the School Committee, has the power to see that the superintendent take responsibility for this. Please exercise your lawful authority and do the difficult and right thing,” she said.
Frustration with the superintendent has also boiled over on social media, where some Brookline parents have been more direct.
“Time for Guillory to go,” wrote one in a local Facebook group. “Guillory must go,” wrote another.
Kevin Mackenzie, a teacher at the Lawrence School, said that he is concerned with the situation in the district.
With Guillory as the school system’s leader, “the buck has to stop with him,” Mackenzie said.
He said the district’s proposed cuts for next year seem to especially target the K-8 schools.
“It is hard to know what programming Dr. Guillory does or does not support as there’s an absence of that type of advocacy during School Committee meetings,” Mackenzie said. “I’m left looking for someone, anyone, in district leadership to advocate for the K-8 schools.”
In an email to Brookline.News, Guillory pointed to outside factors that have contributed to a challenging environment.
“The FY26 budget dilemma is a confluence of several factors: increased costs, lower revenues, fully capturing all operating costs,” he wrote.
The extreme challenges for school districts across Massachusetts include limits on property tax increases, not enough state aid, inflation, rising health care costs, and decreasing access to federal pandemic funds, Guillory wrote.
The Boston Globe reported earlier this month that many Massachusetts school districts are facing a “bleak financial picture … as they grapple with inflation, and rising costs for special education, health insurance, and transportation, as well as the loss of federal pandemic aid and state assistance that fails to keep pace with costs.”
In regard to special education, Guilllory said that the district needs to “build back a special education contingency/reserve fund.
“More often than not, there are unanticipated costs that arise where funding sources are needed,” he wrote.
School Committee divided
The School Committee, a nine-member elected body that has authority over the hiring and firing of superintendents, has not publicly discussed Guillory’s performance since last summer, when it gave him overall positive grades in an official review.
But interviews with several members made clear there are now divided views among the committee about his ability to lead the district and uncertainty about the best path forward.
“The buck stops at the top. Our schools are in a level of crisis that I haven’t seen,” said School Committee member Carolyn Thall, who has had children in Brookline schools for 14 years. “I’m unsatisfied with the quality and quantity of information provided to me as a School Committee member and a member of the public.”
“At this point I don’t see a path out of our multiple crises with our current leadership structure,” Thall said.
Helen Charlupski, the longest-serving member of the Committee and a member of the search committee that recommended hiring Guillory, said that she is still supporting the superintendent.
“I think it’s been a tough time. It’s a tough time for education in general. If you look across most of the communities around us, everybody is in deficit,” Charlupski said.
She called for “perspective.”
“These are really hard times. And people blame the person at the top,” Charlupski said. “But I think he’s doing a good job. I think it’s an impossible job being superintendent these days.”
In a recent interview with Brookline.News, another member, Steven Ehrenberg had said that he is not running for reelection because of “opacity” and a lack of cooperation from Guillory.
Reached for this story, Ehrenberg said that he remains frustrated, and that the administration has still not fully explained the district’s budget problems.
“However, I think the School Committee’s responsibility right now needs to be to agree on a balanced budget that minimizes cuts that directly affect students. We should postpone other discussion until this is done,” Ehrenberg said.
Jesse Hefter, another School Committee member, said that he has concerns about Guillory’s accountability, transparency and leadership.
He pointed to issues including the current fiscal crisis in the schools, Guillory’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, for which the superintendent ultimately apologized, and the recent resignation of Liza O’Connell, the deputy superintendent who oversaw special education services.
“We need clear and defined actions taken by the superintendent, and I’m not sure that’s happening in the way I think it should,” Hefter said. “It just doesn’t seem like we have a very firm hand on the tiller right now.”
Member Sarah Moghtader declined to weigh in on Guillory’s performance, and said that she prefers to take concerns about issues in the schools to him and the leadership of the School Committee directly.
She said she is awaiting the results of the audit, which is about to get underway to investigate both the budget gap and allegations of financial mismanagement.
“I don’t want to underplay that things may very well have gone wrong here, but I want to be part of the solution going forward of regaining the trust of the public so we can get back to our work,” she said.
The other four members of the committee either declined to comment or could not be reached before this story was published.
Guillory told Brookline.News that he feels he still has the support of the committee, even while the relationship is “ongoing and constantly evolving.”
“The School Committee and I are committed to building sustainable budgets that are predictable as well as allow room for innovation,” he wrote. “We will work through the current financial set of challenges as well as continue to improve our budgeting processes so that we do not find ourselves in this predicament in the future.”
He added that he thinks the district has made gains in identifying and presenting the costs for each school and department.
“There have been increased requests for the details behind the numbers, which is reasonable,” he wrote. “Providing the additional layer of information will be useful in communicating in such a way that all understand the meaning behind the numbers.”
Four more years of contract
Guillory is on a six-year contract that runs until June 2029.
The contract, Guillory’s second in Brookline, was approved in November 2022 and began in July 2023. It has not been previously reported in the media, and at the time, the Committee voted publicly to approve the contract but did not disclose details including its length, according to minutes of the meeting. School Committee Chair Andy Liu provided a copy of the contract after a request by Brookline.News.
The six-year contract is the longest legally allowed under Massachusetts law for a school superintendent. With a base salary that escalates from $256,000 in 2024 to $292,000 in 2029, in addition to several scheduled “retention payments,” the total contract is worth nearly $1.7 million.
It allows for either party to terminate the contract; the School Committee if it demonstrates “good cause” and Guillory if he gives at least 120 days notice. “Good cause” is defined in the contract as “any ground put forth by the committee in good faith that is not arbitrary, irrational, unreasonable, or irrelevant to the task of building and maintaining an efficient school system.”
Guillory was hired in 2021, with a three-year contract that was set to end in 2024.
Two people with knowledge of the negotiations, who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly, said that the 2022 renegotiation was initiated by Guillory, and that he had indicated that there were many job openings for superintendents elsewhere.
In his email to Brookline.News, Guillory wrote that previous superintendent contracts had contained benefits that were not in his first contract.
“Additionally, I was the seventh Brookline superintendent in a six-year period when I came to the District; stability was something that was important to the committee and community,” he wrote.