The Boston School Committee passed a $1.58 billion budget proposal Thursday night in a 6-1 vote – committing to funding priorities like inclusive education, multilingual programming and long-term facilities planning in the 2025-26 school year.

“This is the first year entirely without federal ESSER pandemic relief funds,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said at the Wednesday night School Committee meeting. “We are continuing to see the impact of inflation on our maintenance costs, and for the first time in a decade, we are seeing an increase in enrollment with a steady influx of our multilingual learners and students with disabilities, which means we need to change the overall way that we allocate resources.”

The fiscal year 2026 proposal, which must still go through City Council approval, includes a 3.5%, or $53 million, budget increase from FY 2025. The budget was proposed in February and went through five total public meetings.

About $31 million of the 3.5% budget increase will go to maintaining existing services hit by inflation and other cost increases, BPS officials stated previously. For new investments, the officials said, the district will have the remaining $22 million, plus another $21 million saved largely from the first round of school closures and mergers.

School Committee member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez was the only no vote on the budget, citing a need for a “less opaque” path forward on initiatives like the multilingual learner and special education needs, the vision for hub schools, early college, and athletic goals.

“I think we could move with greater urgency and fund with more precision if we tied the budget to those explicit solutions,” Cardet-Hernandez said. “And I just don’t feel that we have achieved that level of clarity yet.”

Other committee members echoed concerns about a lack of long-term planning for budget priorities.

“It seems like almost every priority that we have as a school committee needs its own strategic plan and a schedule for strategic investments, so that every year we know that this is perhaps what it is that we want to invest in, particularly this year, to grow and to stick to that particular plan, while also assessing and making changes,” said member Stephen Alkins, adding the committee is to a degree “flying blind.”

The largest investment in the budget proposal was listed for inclusive education services, followed by bilingual education, which reflects goals in the Inclusive Education Plan overhaul announced in 2023.

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Committee Chair Jeri Robinson echoed concerns from the last budget meeting regarding potential impact of federal threats to the BPS budget, calling a recent trip to Washington “extraordinarily sobering.”

BPS officials said last week around $100 million of federal funding could be at “substantial risk” as the Trump administration moves to dismantle the Department of Education.

“All the things that we fund are necessary to giving our kids the best education possible,” Robinson said. “But how do we go about making the harder choices? And we know, given where we’re heading in this country, we’re going to get to the point that we’re going to have to make hard choices.”