State officials have decided to cut some school-related funding to Winthrop over the town’s failure to comply with the state’s 3A housing law, inflaming local arguments over the town’s increasingly lonely resistance and the state’s stiffening resolve to fight back.

At a School Committee meeting Monday, the superintendent, Lisa Howard, outlined new details of state grant money that Winthrop is now not getting, confirming that town school activities have come under an expanding umbrella of state aid lost by the town over its 3A fight.

The cuts apparently cover a few tens of thousands of dollars in the school district’s $40 million annual budget. But with the line now crossed, school officials said they don’t know the ultimate effect of the standoff at a time when the federal government is cutting school aid, the state government is hunting for spending cuts, and Winthrop is facing tough teacher contract talks and growing enrollment.

Wide blame

The matter erupted at the Town Council meeting the following night, with the body’s president, Jim Letterie, repeatedly accusing Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey of harming Winthrop’s children in the state’s bid to enforce the 3A law.

“She’s putting the safety of our children and our school programs at risk to prove a point on 3A,” said Mr Letterie, who led a sweep of victories in November by council candidates challenging the 3A law.

He was followed at Tuesday’s session by Max Tassinari, the lone council member urging compliance with the law, who berated his colleagues as “obstinate little children” who fought 3A compliance despite the Healey administration making clear for years that the repercussions would include losses of state aid.

“We are the ones breaking the law right now, of our own volition,” Mr Tassinari said.

Definite exclusions

Winthrop was told months ago that it was losing some state grant money outright, and had been declared ineligible to apply for other amounts. The ineligible grants include some $1.2 million in state money that could have been used to help alleviate chronic flooding, and a program that finances projects to help children get safely to school.

Then, at the School Committee meeting Monday, Ms Howard described being told by state officials in recent days that Winthrop had definitively been excluded by the state from an element of the 21st Century Grant program, which relays federal money to towns for supplemental school programs such as summer internships and additional help for low-income students.

That lost grant money was worth just under $10,000, Ms Howard said. But Winthrop’s schools also get a $20,000 component of that same 21st Century Grant program that now looks uncertain, officials said. And it won a primary grant under the 21st Century program, worth $219,000 over three years, that will be up for renewal next year.

Separately, Winthrop schools won a $69,000 state grant for mental health services. That amount appears intact, but when the state recently distributed another $17,000 in additional funds to the grant recipients, school officials said, Winthrop was among a small number of communities excluded from that supplemental amount because of their failure to comply with the 3A law.

Legislative counters

The net result of those funding losses, said Layne Petrie, the chair of the Winthrop School Committee, is that Winthrop schools are now clearly missing some money over the town’s 3A situation and do not yet know how large that situation will grow. As for the possibility of growing grant losses, she added: “It’s leaning that way.”

The 3A law sets out specific categories of grant money that towns will lose if they do not comply with 3A. The law also gave the governor some discretion over additional funding that can be withheld from the towns – now numbering about a dozen – that are still refusing to comply with 3A. The federal government also has decided to cut its own Title 1 program for low-income students by 15 percent next year – an amount that for Winthrop means about $54,000, Ms Petrie said.

The town’s state senator, Lydia Edwards, while urging Winthrop comply with 3A, called on WCAT’s Winthrop and the World program last month for school funding to be excluded from the repercussions. Senator Edwards then reiterated that position after Ms Howard outlined the school aid cuts. “I don’t think students and education should be part of a zoning debate,” she said. “I will do my best to plug in holes wherever funding is needed to protect education.”

And Winthrop’s state representative, Jeff Turco, has consistently criticized the 3A law and urged town officials to defy it. He said he is pursuing a legislative measure, known as an earmark, that would help cover the losses by providing Winthrop with $100,000 for activities of the 21st Century program.

Contract talks

Mr Letterie, meanwhile, is still asking state officials to keep talking with him about options for overcoming the situation, and suggested at the council meeting Tuesday that it’s the state’s responsibility to do so. “They have to come to the table and discuss with us,” he said.

The Town Council president also described the town’s recent filing in the legal case brought by the state attorney general against Winthrop and other non-compliant towns, and said the town manager is compiling a list of the town’s 3A-affected grants.

The Winthrop School Committee faced the prospect of state grant reductions at the same time it is 10 months into talks on reaching a new three-year contract with its 250-member union. The agreement expired last June, with the sides still struggling to find agreement on salaries.

The schools have a budget of about $40 million, more than half of the town’s entire spending. In the contract talks, the School Committee has offered pay and benefit increases that it estimated as worth an additional $3.1 million for the union. But its offer has been about $2 million short of the request from teachers, who argue that their members – especially at the highest and lowest end of the pay scales – are underpaid compared to teachers in neighboring towns.

Limited options

Ms Petrie said that School Committee members respect the teachers and are sympathetic to the union’s request, but has hit a limit on the amount of money that the town has available for it. “That is kind of as much wiggle room as the school committee has,” she said of the $3.1 million figure.

The School Committee also has reached the limit on areas where it can balance the budget by cutting programs or increasing fees, given that the schools already charge students for sports and other programs, and has few language and music offerings to eliminate, Ms Petrie said.

The main remaining option, she said, would be to increase the school system’s average classroom size, which currently sits at an average of about 23 or 24 students across the system, roughly close to the statewide average.

Enrollment in Winthrop’s schools is rising slowly, at both the lower and upper grade levels, and now exceeds 2,000, after years of being slightly below that level, Ms Petrie said.