Author: Ayana Pierre-Maxwell

  • Tracking Wellesley Select Board’s plan to split town, school budgets

    The Wellesley Select Board recently came to consensus about splitting the school budget from the town’s overall spending plan, ending a decades-long practice of consolidating Wellesley’s municipal finances into a single budget. 

    Town Meeting member Michael Tobin proposed the separation at this past spring’s Annual Town Meeting. “This motion is a necessary step,” he said, “toward responsible governance and fiscal transparency.”  

    While some Town Meeting members look forward to more accessible and digestible information about Wellesley’s budgets when Annual Town Meeting begins on March 3, others in town are wary of possible repercussions. 

    The FY26 school budget is $94,035,026, just over 44% of the town’s overall spending plan.

    Town Meeting members for years have been forced to wait until after all town department and School Committee presentations to debate and vote on the entire budget, a process that can take more than one session.

    The school budget is often presented last. If a department item is an issue, a Town Meeting member would need to recall it and refresh the group’s memory.

    Tobin said a dedicated motion for school finances would help members stay organized and lead to better debates. “I expect and hope we’re gonna have better conversations and debates in Town Meetings,” he said, “It’ll be richer conversation … and I think it’s gonna lead to a better outcome.” 

    Katherine Babson proposed the omnibus budget at Town Meeting in 1986. She initially opposed splitting the budget, but describes herself as “agnostic” about the change. She said she would fight any effort to break down the budget further.

    Before 1986,Town Meeting members reviewed as many as 80 separate articles for individual departments. “It went on forever,” Babson said, and in the end, when the voting body got to the last few articles, no one was listening.  

    School Committee Chair Niki Ofenloch and former chair Linda Chow attempted to safeguard the omnibus budget’s original intent. 

    They argued that the omnibus budget has continued to provide a clear representation of school costs. Chow said the School Committee worked hard to sift through and vet the school system’s 426-page budget.

    “We talk a lot about … ‘One Wellesley’ and wanting to approach things with a whole community focus,” said Ofenloch, “and I think that dividing the motions … siloes the schools from the rest of the town.”

    Chow said splitting the budgets may have severe, unintended consequences when uncertainty around school funding continues to swirl. “What message is the Select Board sending by creating this separation?” she asked. 

    During a Sept. 30 meeting about preparation for the 2027 fiscal year, the board confirmed it would be moving forward with the split. Select Board Chair Marjorie Freiman said Town Meeting members wanted “more clarity on how the [school’s] numbers are derived” and to “fully and fairly reflect the cost of schools.” 

    The change may create logistical problems, Chow said. What would happen, for example, if one budget passes and the other doesn’t?

    “If there’s cuts, for some reason, there’s dates … built into the contract by which we need to notify staff members,” she said. “And if we don’t have a balanced budget by any of those dates … in theory, then we don’t have any money past June 30 by which to pay our staff.” 

    Select Board members presented four options for handling unbalanced budgets: requiring the School Committee to prepare a list of potential cuts, drawing on free cash reserves, voting down the town budget, or overriding it.

    Vice Chair Tom Ulfelder told the board the School Committee needs to actively participate in developing the budget from the beginning.

    Many people don’t understand the “extraordinary complexity of educating children in the public school system in Massachusetts today,” Ulfelder said, so they cannot comprehend why the costs are increasing while enrollment is decreasing. 

    Some members of the community still view school as simply reading, writing, and arithmetic, he said. “It’s not just the requirements under special education,” he said, “but it’s the impact of COVID, it’s the social emotional learning, it’s the impact of so many factors that are affecting these children in their safe and healthy development.”

    Wellesley’s foray into splitting the budgets has attracted attention from other regional elected officials. Natick Select Board Chair Bruce Evans said he’ll be monitoring the change. Most Massachusetts municipalities use combined budgets. 

    Evans said there’s a fine line between information overload and the concise information that people are looking for, and Natick is still finding the balance. “I’ll be curious to see how it plays out,” he said.

    Babson, the architect of the combined budget in Wellesley, suggested the revised approach to finances may make it easier for new Town Meeting members.“Older Town Meeting members have been through it a million times,” she said, “while new Town Meeting members might not know … when to say or how to express their questions.”  

    Transparency in the budgeting process, she said, is a reasonable desire. “Maybe we need to do a better job of educating everybody.”

  • Wellesley Hills Church Pumpkin Patch: A colorful tradition of volunteers and community spirit

    The Wellesley Hills Congregational Church has hosted a New England-styled pumpkin harvest for more than two decades, a tradition featuring pimpled gourds in marbled green and sunshine gold, alongside cozy bunches of ribbed orange orbs – some tall, others stout, all plump and ready for purchase.

    The tradition continued last week in Wellesley, as more than 40 good-natured volunteers gathered to unload a truckload of future jack-o-lanterns, porch decorations and pumpkin pies.

    Afterward, Nancy Simons and Paul Bruchez stood on the church lawn, surveying the sea of dimpled orange.

    “It’s a multi-generational event,” said Bruchez, who has volunteered at the pumpkin patch since 2003. “I don’t think there’s anything else like this in Wellesley.” 

    “It’s a community event…that connects new people that come into the community whether they moved from Texas or they moved from China or they moved from Ghana,” said former Wellesley Selectman Jack Morgan, a veteran pumpkin patch volunteer and former deacon and moderator at the church.  

    He estimated that more than half of the church volunteers at the pumpkin patch during their 3 week-run.

    Several of the high school volunteers were originally just looking to complete required community service, but they fell in love with the festivities and kept coming back.

    Ally Shi was one of them. She’s been volunteering for three years. “I totally think that a bunch of high schoolers, when they first started …volunteering…thought ‘Oh I’m just gonna do this for school,’” Shi said. “But, like, as I kept doing it more and more and like giving back to the community, it actually felt really amazing, and made me really happy.” 

    For 22 years, the pumpkin patch has been a scenic backdrop for family photos and wedding shoots, a field day for excited toddlers, a time capsule for returning buyers, and a reliable source of charitable community bonding. 

    Pumpkin Patch backstory

    It all began with a youth pastors’ crazy idea, one that eventually gave rise to the moniker, “pumpkin church.” Today, the Wellesley Hills Congregational Church’s fundraiser is one of the most highly anticipated and loved events in town. 

    Laurie Otten was the first chairwoman. She visited the patch that inspired it all, the Carter Memorial Church in Needham, which gave her some idea of dos and don’ts. 

    She said unloading is the trickiest part. 

    The pumpkins used to be delivered loose in the belly of an 18-wheeler. No boxes, just hay and pumpkins stacked to the roof. 

    The adults couldn’t maneuver themselves to the top of the pile inside the trucks, so organizers deployed 12-year-old “pile monkeys” to send pumpkins down while offering an occasional avalanche warning. 

    The Hills Church used a good old-fashioned assembly line, running from inside the truck onto the lawn. Efficient, for sure, but the old way isn’t easy on today’s average body, particularly for those catching pumpkins from a 13-foot drop.

    Volunteers say the last person on the truck and the first person on the ground have the worst jobs. “I managed to catch one in a way that tore a little bit in my shoulder one year,” said Otten. “So, I don’t do that anymore.” 

    At one point, the team cleared an enormous pile, only to reveal a carton with about 100 more small pumpkins. “It was like so depressing,” Bruchez sighed. 

    Soon after, a little blonde girl lifted their spirits. “‘I’ll get in,’” Bruchez remembered her calling out. She was lowered into the carton and happily went to work, giving the group enough rest to finish the job with gusto.

    Bruchez also went to the Needham church to gather intel. “They had a huge group of 20-something men who were briskly unloading,” Bruchez said. “We did not have a large group of 20-something men.”

    But they did have a group of geeky engineers who used their brains instead of their backs. They developed a ramp system that allowed loose pumpkins to roll from the truck to the ground. 

    Today, most pumpkins arrive on pallets. The church rents a forklift and hires a driver to transfer the pallets to the loading areas. 

    For the event’s first 10-15 years, Otten said late delivery trucks and primitive cellphones led to frayed nerves. One year, a lost driver arrived after dark, forcing volunteers to buy lights at Home Depot so they could unload pumpkins. In possibly the worst case, a driver enroute to Wellesley completely abandoned his truck load of pumpkins. 

    “We had no way of communicating with the driver and they had no way of communicating with us,” Otten said. “It broke down somewhere. They found it sometime later … abandoned on the side of the road. I can imagine that must’ve been a very smelly truck.”

    Soon after, a new load of pumpkins arrived at the church.

    This year’s delivery arrived a day early, on Monday. Volunteers arrived in the late afternoon the next day and calmly unloaded the pumpkins with practiced hands. Cardboard boxes flanked the lawn until workers pushing wheel barrels rolled the pumpkins into their final position. 

    “You look out here today, you see very young people and people who are not so young, but young at heart, and everybody is out here working together,” said Kristen Toffer, co-chair of the event. “Somebody told me in the church, (the event is) … like having a barn raising, everybody in the community is coming out to raise a barn.” 

    Volunteers described the process as “organized chaos,” but it looked like a well-oiled machine to observers.

    A serious fundraiser

    These pumpkins’ stories began before they were harvested in New Mexico, before they were passed hand-to-hand along a chain of volunteers in Wellesley, and long before they were purchased for decorations, or other artisanal projects. The pumpkin patch story began with a handshake sealed by trust in 1974. 

    The first pumpkin fundraiser was a deal between Richard and Janice Hamby who ran a three-acre pumpkin patch and a local church. The Hamby’s would supply goods for the church’s fundraiser, and they would share the proceeds. A simple deal turned into a family-run business as the Hamby’s acquired more partners. Today, they partner with more than 1,000 organizations nationwide, delivering pumpkins on consignment.

    After Hurricane Hugo, the Hamby’s moved their operations to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. In collaboration with the Navajo Nation, Pumpkin Patch Fundraisers grows 1,200 acres of pumpkins and employs over 700 Native Americans to run the operation and coordinate the harvest.

    Sixty percent of the funds raised by each organization is returned to Pumpkin Patch Fundraisers and dispersed to the Indigenous community. 

    The Hills Church pumpkin patch fundraiser is a shared experience that reaches beyond the Wellesley community. Each pumpkin connects a farmer to a family, and the money raised connects Wellesley to the world. 

    Though it is not widely known, the Hills Church pumpkin patch fundraiser supports various community service operations such as disaster relief groups and Family Promise Metrowest, a non-profit that provides education, shelter, and other types of support to families in need. 

    This year, proceeds will support the Wellesley Food Pantry and the Hills Church Youth Service Trip.  

    Pastor Zach Kerzee became the director of youth ministry and congregational engagement at the Hills Church in January. He said he was excited to participate in this quintessential Hills community event and organize the youth service trip. One of his responsibilities is to rebuild the youth service trip post-Covid.  

    He said the service trip and the community service opportunities allow young people to be a part of the world outside of their screens. “So much of kids’ lives are through their phones,” Kerzee said. “It’s important for kids to think outside of themselves. It’s important for kids to broaden their world view.” 

    Next spring, a group of 6-12 graders will visit Puerto Rico. Kerzee said the goal is not to indoctrinate or impose themselves on a community, but to learn, share life experiences, and do some good along the way. 

    No phones are allowed on the trip, a prohibition Kerzee described as “detox.” Participating in community events gets the kids to connect with real people, he said, preparing them to meaningfully engage in their cultural exchange. 

    The goal of the fundraiser is not oriented around the money raised, it’s just to sell out. And they usually do. Last year, the Hills Church raised $32,000 and donated $6,600 to the youth service trip and the food pantry. 

    “I believe we need positive things that we can do concretely,” said Morgan. “And working at the pumpkin patch is a concrete thing you can do.”

  • SunDay protest held in Wellesley went beyond environmental justice issues

    Anti-Trump protestors co-mingled with demonstrators promoting environmental justice on Sept. 21 in front of Wellesley Town Hall, resulting in a shared event among residents with similar social and political sensibilities.

    SunDay, a national event promoting clean energy and sustainable technologies, attracted approximately 100 people on a Sunday afternoon, representing activists opposed to recent presidential policies and climate advocates. The group occupied the lawn in front of Town Hall and spilled across a public sidewalk.

    Many activists held homemade signs, some of which read, “It’s Science, Stupid,” “There’s No Planet B,” “Defend Democracy,” and “So Many Things, So Little Cardboard.”

    Quentin Prideaux, a board member of Sustainable Wellesley, spoke to the crowd. He said Earth’s health gets worse every day, but hope for the future is embodied in citizen activists like those assembled in Wellesley. “The majority of the population of this country wants renewable energy,” he said. “You are the majority … you can help it happen a little bit faster.”

    At one point, the crowd took up the tune of “Bella Ciao,” an anthem of Italian anti-fascists. 

    “We need to rise up,” protesters sang. “We need to open our eyes and do it now, now, now!”

    Behind the demonstration, two tables offered direct and indirect ways to fight the Trump administration. One table provided postage-paid postcards for participants to write directly to voters in Virginia, encouraging them to vote for progressive initiatives. Another table dispensed multi-colored paper clips in response to journalist E. Jean Carroll’s call for the revival of the paper clip protest, a World War II-era silent dissent against the Nazis. Carroll accused President Trump of sexual assault, and later won an $83.3-million defamation lawsuit against him.

    “We’re losing ground with our ecology, with our freedom…we need to stand up and be counted,” said Wendyl Ross. She sat at the edge of the protest. When asked what it meant to be “counted” she said, “Hopefully that our votes will be counted…that our voices will be recognized.” 

    Ross said she feels grateful to live in Wellesley, where the town government takes care of its citizens and houses a “world-class” recycling area. 

    Sam Hunt had a “No Stupid Kings” sign hung around his neck while holding a cane and an American flag. He said he attended SunDay specifically to protest Trump, and plans on writing a letter to The Boston Globe questioning what he called the newspaper’s unbalanced political coverage of the Trump administration. 

    “Let’s see if they put this on the front page,” he said. 

    Looking into the street, he said it was disappointing not to see more young faces. 

    Wellesley High School junior Jonathan Luu appeared as the second guest speaker. Taking AP Environmental Science, he said, taught him about human impacts on natural ecosystems.

    “Buy less stuff,” he said, accusing many manufacturers of polluting the Earth. Luu suggested people shop at Wellesley Give-and-Take and thrift shops. Hand-me-downs, he said, make ecological and financial sense.   

    Near the end of the day, Raina McManus, a member of Sustainable Wellesley, said the cacophony of voices and opinions added to the impact of the event.

    “If we don’t have a healthy, sustainable planet,” she said, “What’s the point of having a democracy?” 

  • Wellesley sports fields to get lifesaving heart devices

    It’s a soccer Saturday morning at Sprague Field in Wellesley, a wholesome and healthy vision of Americana, featuring swarms of sweaty young athletes and sidelines populated by cheering parents, grandparents and siblings.

    It would be easy in this idyllic setting, standing in cool Autumn air with mid-morning sun on your shoulders, to feel insulated from the grim possibilities of life. With so much going right, what could possibly go wrong? Cardiac arrests, heart attacks and life-threatening arrhythmias are remote threats, until a kid is clutching her chest.

    Soon, Wellesley’s sports fields will be equipped to respond to cardiac emergencies. Two Automated External Defibrillators, portable devices designed to shock hearts back into normal rhythm, should be installed in coming months. Then coaches and others will be trained to use them.

    “I think, sadly, it’s not something that people become aware of until it’s something that affects them,” said Katie Stewart, a nurse practitioner specializing in cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. As a mom with young athletes, she knows the dangers. More than 350,000 cardiac arrests happen outside a hospital each year. Of those, 90% are fatal, according to a report by the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, a national non-profit group focused on eliminating preventable deaths. Approximately four out of every 10 sudden cardiac arrests in children are sports related.

    Stewart knows the statistics too well. She runs the Cardiovascular Performance Program with a team of physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the advocacy chair for the Massachusetts chapter of the American College of Cardiology and a member of the American College of Cardiology Sports and Exercise Council.

    “Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death in youth sports. It can strike healthy kids with no warning on the field at practice or even on the sidelines,” she said. “We know that every minute without CPR and AED reduces the survival chances by 10%, so after about 10 minutes survival is almost zero. But with immediate CPR and AED, survival rates can triple.”

    Wellesley Health Department Director Lenny Izzo provided an update at a Board of Health meeting earlier in September. “Fire has put the purchase through, so we’re just waiting for the devices to be delivered,” he said, adding that AEDs are available at town buildings. He said two AEDs will be installed at Sprague and Hunnewell fields, followed by more in the future.

    Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition that results in the thickening of walls in the heart’s main pumping chamber, is often asymptomatic, according to a fact sheet from the National Institutes of Health. Emergencies can be triggered by strenuous physical activity.

    A 2018 NIH study estimated 18,000 Americans have shockable cardiac arrests in public each year, and about 1,700 lives are saved by AEDs. 

    “Wellesley has always been a leader in education in youth development, and public health,” Stewart said. “I think this is another chance to lead by making our athletic fields not just places for play, but also places of safety.” 

    Wellesley Fire Department Lieutenant Paul Delaney said the portable defibrillators will include a label with picture-based instructions, and simple audio directions are available in English and Spanish, so the device can be used by most people. 

    One major benefit of AEDs is this: the equipment is available 24/7. 

    “If AEDs are available in our community, and our community is trained to use them, we’re not just protecting the student athletes, we’re also protecting the parents, the coaches and the grandparents who are spectators on those fields,” Stewart said. 

    Wellesley United Soccer Club Intown Director Joe Morais said he’s always worried about children playing sports without nearby AEDs. He oversees the pre-K through third-grade program, and professionally coaches three club teams that play games at Elm Bank Reservation. 

    Despite being trained on how to use the devices, Morais said his teams have not had access to portable AEDs. 

    “It [will be] like a huge relief having one,” he said. “Before you start coaching every season you have to take like a safety sport course. It’s always terrifying going through because you’re like, ‘Oh, this could really happen one day.’” 

    AED training can be completed in as little as 30 minutes. Many Wellesley police officers carry the portable defibrillators in their patrol cars.

    “It’s rare to find an AED on a field like this,” said Wellesley Youth Field Hockey coach and parent Jonathan Gerbode-Grant, a nurse practitioner specializing in cardiology. He said he rarely considers the risk of playing sports without access to the devices. “Would it make me feel more comfortable, sure. Especially because adults and kids are around. We don’t know if anyone has a pre-existing health condition.”