The Mayor Said It Himself
Why Methuen's Charter Should Remove the Mayor from the School Committee
Written by: Dan Shibilia
At a recent Methuen School Committee meeting, Mayor Beauregard said something that no mayor in this city has said before. Facing a vote on the school budget he had proposed, he told the committee exactly what he thought of it:
“I am not voting tonight on something I think is good. I’m not in favor of it. If I weren’t the mayor and didn’t have a fiduciary obligation to submit a balanced budget to the council, I would be voting no. I’d probably be wearing a red shirt right now on the other side of this podium.
Given the position that I am in, I have to present a balanced budget to the council. I have to make that very difficult choice. I would love to join you, I truly would, but I can’t.”
That honesty deserves genuine credit. The mayor said the quiet thing out loud, in a public meeting. This is something that the ongoing Charter Review Committee opted to ignore in the revamp of our Charter and how the structure of Methuen’s government. The simple fact is that the roles of mayor and school committee member are fundamentally in conflict and no person can serve both faithfully at the same time. He was right. And his candor makes the case for a reform that Methuen’s Charter Review Committee should act on.
How We Got Here: A Short History
To understand why the mayor chairs the school committee, it helps to trace how the charter arrived at that arrangement, because it was not always this way and it did not happen by accident.
Methuen’s original Home Rule Charter, effective in 1978, put a city council member on the school committee as its seventh seat. That experiment did not last long. In 1981, Methuen voters eliminated the appointed council seat and replaced it with a sixth elected at-large member, leaving the committee fully elected and fully independent.[1]
That arrangement held for fifteen years. Then, in 1993, Methuen made its most significant governance change in decades: it converted from a town manager form of government to an elected mayor. The position of mayor was new to Methuen in the modern era, and with it came questions about how the mayor would relate to the school committee.[2]
The answer came in 1996. The city council passed Resolution #3745, which was submitted to the General Court as a home rule petition. The legislature enacted it as Chapter 148 of the Acts and Resolves of 1996. Methuen voters ratified it at a special election that November. The new law rewrote Article 4, Section 4-1(a) of the charter to read that the mayor shall serve as the seventh member of the school committee and shall also serve as the chairman thereof with full power to vote.[3]
In plain English: the voters, in 1996, amended their own charter to give the newly created mayor a seat at the table and the gavel. The stated rationale at the time appears to have been coordination: a mayor who was also committee chair could better align the school budget with the city’s overall fiscal plan. The logic was that tighter executive involvement would reduce the friction between city hall and the school department.
Nearly thirty years of experience suggests the opposite has been true. What the 1996 amendment created was not coordination but a structural conflict, one that Mayor Beauregard himself has now publicly acknowledged.
What the Charter Actually Says
The current charter makes the mayor not just a member of the school committee but its presiding officer a.k.a the Chair. Under Article 4, Section 4-2, the chair prepares the agenda for every meeting, presides and decides all questions of order, and appoints every member of every school committee subcommittee, standing or special.[4] The six elected members of the committee can vote, but the mayor sets the agenda, controls the floor, and determines who sits on every subcommittee that does the committee’s detailed work. This does not happen today. The superintendent’s office controls the agenda with input from the whole body and subcommittees are voted appointments.
The mayor is also, under Article 6 of the charter, the officer who submits the school department’s budget to the city council as part of the overall municipal budget.[5] The school committee submits its request to the mayor first, and the mayor then decides what to present to the council.[6] The council can reduce that figure but, except on the mayor’s own recommendation, cannot increase it. Althrough, the functional reality is that the School Committee and School Administration sit ideally by waiting for a mayor to provide a budget number.
The mayor thus controls the budget at every stage: receiving the committee’s request, deciding what to forward to the council, and presiding over the committee that is supposed to advocate for the schools.
That is the structure Mayor Beauregard described when he said he could not vote his conscience because of the position he holds. He was not complaining about a bad situation. He was accurately describing the architecture of a conflict that the charter built in.
The Mayor Should Not Vote
The mayor’s remarks raise a question that goes beyond the chairmanship: should the mayor be a voting member of the school committee at all?
Standard governance practice treats conflicts of interest as disqualifying for specific votes. A board member with a financial stake in a decision is expected to recuse themselves. The mayor of Methuen has a direct structural stake in every school budget vote, because the mayor is the official who proposed the budget and who is legally responsible for submitting a balanced plan to the city council. When the mayor votes to approve the budget, it is a self-ratifying act. When the mayor votes against it, as he indicated he wished he could do, it would be a mayor publicly repudiating his own fiscal edict.
Mayor Beauregard essentially issued a public recusal statement from the table. He told the committee he wished he could vote differently but could not because of the position he holds. The logical conclusion of his own statement is that the position he holds is incompatible with the vote he is being asked to cast. If the mayor himself recognizes that, the charter should reflect it.
What the Charter Review Committee Should Do (Should Have Done)
Methuen’s Charter Review Committee presented its near-final draft at a public hearing on April 9, 2026.[7] That draft does not propose any substantive changes to Article 4. The mayor remains the seventh member, the president, and a full voting member of the school committee.[8]
That is a missed opportunity and, frankly, a big mistake. Most Massachusetts cities and towns that have school committees do not give the mayor a seat or a gavel. The Massachusetts Association of School Committee’s own guidance notes that in most communities the committee elects its own officers, and that the mayoral chairmanship is an exception rather than the rule.[9] Methuen created this exception in 1996 for reasons that made sense in theory but have not worked in practice.
The fix the committee should/should have recommend(ed) is straightforward: amend Article 4 to remove the mayor as a member and presiding officer of the school committee. The Mayor’s role at the School Committee table should be the same as his role at the City Council table. Both bodies, the School Committee and the City Council, are legislative bodies and to treat them differently is a double standard in the city's governing document and one that gives the mayor a vote over the schools that he is explicitly denied over the other legislative body of city government. That power should belong to someone whose only obligation is to the committee’s educational mission.
Taking the Mayor at His Word
Mayor Beauregard did something genuinely valuable at that meeting. He named the conflict honestly and publicly in a way that invites a real conversation about the structure of governance in this city. The right response from the charter review committee would be to not to let this moment pass unremarked. If the mayor believes enough to make such a public statement regarding how the structure places him in an impossible position, the structure should be reexamined.
The 1996 amendment that created this arrangement was approved by voters. Removing it will also require voter approval. The Charter Review Committee’s job is to recommend what should go on the ballot. Mayor Beauregard, from the seat of the Chair of the School Committee, has already made the case for putting this question before the people of Methuen.
Sources
[1] Methuen Home Rule Charter, Article 4, Section 4-1(a). Chapter 148 of the Acts and Resolves of 1996, enacted by the General Court and accepted by Methuen voters November 5, 1996.
[2] Methuen Home Rule Charter, Article 4, Section 4-2(b). The charter vests in the President the power to prepare agendas, preside at all meetings, decide all questions of order, and appoint all committee members, standing or special.
[3] Methuen Home Rule Charter (as amended), Article 4, Section 4-1(a) and Section 4-2. Under the current charter the mayor is both seventh member and President. The 2026 Charter Review Committee draft (HRC_CLEAN.pdf, April 9, 2026 public hearing) retains this structure unchanged.
[4] The Boston Globe, “Methuen mayor, School Committee divided over district budget,” June 13, 2025.
[5] CBS Boston / WBZ-TV, “Methuen, Massachusetts struggling to close $9.6M school budget gap,” May 2025.
[6] Methuen Home Rule Charter, Article 6, Section 6-3. The school committee submits its budget to the mayor at least 30 days before the mayor submits the overall city budget to the city council.
[7] Methuen Home Rule Charter, Article 4, Section 4-7(a); Article 6, Section 6-4. The city council adopts the budget, but may not increase any line item except on recommendation of the mayor.
[8] Eagle Tribune, “Public hearing on charter changes April 9,” March 26, 2026. The article describes the proposed charter overhaul and notes the IT consolidation dispute as a motivating example of inter-departmental conflict.
[9] Massachusetts Association of School Committees, Member Handbook. The MASC notes that in some cities the mayor presides as chairman of the school committee, while in most communities the committee elects its own officers.