Are School Budget Cuts Vindictive?

Just prior to the annual Town Meeting on May 5, an email chain found its way around the Wilton community, its contents a series of rallying cries for parents to get out and support the school budget.

Many parents responded, filling Middlebrook's auditorium past capacity, with most speaking passionately about the importance of Wilton's school system and the need to approve an already lean budget. A few days later, that budget passed overwhelmingly.

The contents of the email chain, however, made some interesting accusations. Among them were allusions to a townspeople that are apathetic about the school system and a school board that, when asked to make budget cuts, does so vindictively.

"They [the Board of Education] always cut the things that hurt the kids the most and try to get an outcry," one portion of the email said.

"Those of us that are responsible in this area have spent our entire adult lives trying to do the best we can for young people," said Superintendent Gary Richards when he sat down with Patch to discuss the claim last week. "The last thing that any of us would engage in would be to make budget cuts that are in any way, shape or form punitive in nature."

"There were no easy cuts...and anybody who thought the cuts were vindictive should have had the opportunity to sit in on the meetings with the principals agonizing over what was being cut," said Director of Financial Planning & Operations Ken Post. "The word vindictive would never come out of their mouth."

To Richards and Post's point, the Board of Education began with a prospective budget slated to increase 4.81 percent over the previous year's simply as a result of contractual obligations and rising costs. Even after months of winnowing and the school's leadership and administrators agreeing to wage freezes, the school board was .

Extenuating economic circumstances and expenses out of the board's control (Richards estimated only five to seven percent of the entire budget was discretionary) undoubtedly made it an exceptionally difficult budget year. For evidence, look no further than a system that was forced to cut 27.1 FTEs and drastically scale back curriculum and professional development, all of which would be difficult to consider vindictive reductions in any light.

But looking at some of the other things that were ultimately cut does seem to beg the leading question.

For instance, in a $3.2 million transportation budget, the board decided to save $3,800 by not sending the school band to away games. While arguably not a crucial part of a child's education, $3,800 does seem a small savings to garner in lieu of rewarding hard-working high school musicians with a chance to perform and support their teams.

"I have a band jacket, I'm a groupie," Richards said empathetically. "But to make the kinds of cost containment measures that enabled [the Board of Education] to keep their costs low and make them more profitable, it was a lot of little things that in the aggregate amounted to big things."

Consider, then, something bigger like an enrichment program that supports gifted students from Kindergarten through the eighth grade. This program, run by paraprofessionals, provided many students an important chance to supplement their education during their formative years. Its elimination concerns many parents who believe it is often the more talented students who are hurt the most during budget cuts.

"The most important thing our society does is educate our children...and it's a shared responsibility," said Wilton resident James Anderson at the school board's public budget hearing. "I would be willing to pay, happily, for every one of my children from dollar one...but when we begin to cut away things at the margin, it's not special education, it's not the average student...it's the gifted student that suffers the most...this is a disaster because at the end of the day if our society is going to succeed in the future, it will be on the backs of the most talented among us."

"It's another program that the state encourages but provides no monetary support for," Richards said when asked about enrichment. "We fully understand that the parents who have young people who are the most gifted are frustrated with some of our strategies."

Richards went on to say that the school system is currently in negotiations with the paraprofessionals union to consider a budget freeze and, if such an agreement is reached, it is possible or even likely that the enrichment program would come back.

"The principals at those schools will still be able to challenge the students and still offer some [enrichment] directly to them," Post added. "It's obviously not the ideal situation of having the program intact, but it's not like the experience is completely going away."

Union concessions (or lack thereof) have played a prominent role throughout Wilton's budget process. In the school system, Richards estimated leadership and administrators union wage freezes saved somewhere around $100,000, and more could be on the way if the custodial and paraprofessional unions agree to similar deals.

The Wilton Education Association (teachers union), however, rejected a wage freeze outright and said it intended to serve out the remainder of its contract. The move caused consternation among a number of residents at the public hearing and town meeting and, while not uncommon across the state, did limit the flexibility of what could be cut within Wilton's budget.

"Obviously we hoped that the association would look at this very carefully and discuss it with its membership," Richards said. "The teacher group is the biggest part of our salary payroll and if we had gotten concessions, none of [these cuts] would have had to have happened...it would have been a game-changer for this system."

Richards went on to touch on the difficult task of communicating effectively with the public, indicating that perhaps some parents believe budget cuts are vindictive because they have not been part of the entire budget process themselves and, thus, have not seen all the effort and rationale that goes into the final decisions.

"The piece I think is frustrating is that we were telling people as early as November that we would have to cut people and programs," Richards said. "At the 12th hour, people say, 'Gee, I had no idea.' And you want to say, 'We were broadcasting this in a very major way throughout the year."

The point is a good one, both in terms of empirical data and the aforementioned email chain.

Of Wilton's 11,244 registered voters in November of 2009, 4,164 people voted on the proposed liquor store ordinance change, a 38.4 percent turnout for an issue that, really, does not directly impact the mill rate or town services. Compare that to the 1,228 voters (nine percent) who turned out to vote on the town budget.

"The parents of this town don't care about anything, particularly, [sic] the education in this town," read part of the email chain. While the quote was attributed to someone apparently trying to goad the author into a discussion, and while it is hyperbolic, perhaps the speaker does have a point. In a budget process rife with service and school-related reductions that will likely affect all townspeople, the number of Wiltonians that voted in May was not even one third of the number that voted for legalizing package stores just six months before.

"It is only one night of your lives that can make a HUGE impact on our children's forever," the email continues. "Let's prove to these people that we do care about our children and their education!"

To Richards' point, one night of civic engagement is not enough to serve either Wiltonians' or the board's interests, particularly if the two are opposed.

Some Board of Education members feel that starting the budget process earlier might help better engage the general populous and create productive dialogue, while others feel dissent is a natural byproduct of a difficult year.

"I've suggested at least once if not more that we start the budget process earlier," said James Saxe in an April 29 Board of Education meeting. "If there's any way we can have more wiggle room up front and have a more collaborative conversation next year...if we take a look earlier on, we might be more in agreement."

"Unlike my colleagues who feel the process was too short, I didn't find it so," said Barbara Myers. "It took us a long time in our country's history to achieve free public education and it's frightening to wonder how we can undo a lot of that if we're not careful. Perhaps nothing better defines, unifies and divides a community than the expenditure of large amounts of money on anything."

Saxe and Myers' comments typify a division on the Board of Education. Saxe and particularly his fellow board member Bruce Likly both expressed concern that the board was cutting too far into critical areas of the school system and was too resistant in looking at broader changes.

Likly, for instance, made a motion at an April 15 meeting to reevaluate graduation requirements so the board could analyze the school system's non-core curriculum and perhaps garner some savings by cutting less vital classes (he pointed to the fact that the high school offers six different jewelry-making classes). He recalled that the move was "flatly ignored."

"What they said [that] night was that jewelry-making and ceramics are more important than all those other things (technology, enrichment, etc.)," he said later.

When asked why graduation requirements weren't reevaluated, Richards said that Wilton requires more credits to graduate than many schools in the state and does so because it believes in a rigorous education. But he also added that Wilton seeks to be as comprehensive a school system as possible and that means offering a wide range of options for a wide range of students.

"The idea of a comprehensive high school is that you're serving kids 95 percent of whom go on to college," he said. "But you're also serving five percent who don't go to college...when you talk about the core curriculum, it's important to have a wide range of courses."

The ideological divide among board members consists of those, like Likly, who believe the school system should analyze the way things are being done from top to bottom and who would prefer to offer some programs, like pay-to-play athletics, that are partially subsidized by parents and students instead of not offering them at all.

"I'm frustrated at being told on behalf of these kids that they can't participate in the clubs and we can't find a participation fee to make that happen," Likly said at a fiery April 15 board meeting.

On the other side are board members like Myers who believe the foundation of a public school education is that it should be free and should provide equal opportunities to all its students, or not provide them at all. And the division is not an equal one, as evidenced by the board's 4-1 passage of a motion to shoot down activity fees in athletics (Likly was the lone dissenter).

Likly said after that meeting that he was frustrated by what he felt was the Board of Education making a "dictatorial decision" on behalf of a large portion of Wilton's population. Likly also made another motion that evening to push the activity fee vote to a meeting where there was an opportunity for public comment, which was not seconded and fell by the wayside.

"My kid has been in orchestra for four years," Liky said later as an example. "I don't think my next door neighbor should have to pay for that...we've got to figure out a way to make our schools bigger and smaller at the same time."

That perhaps best characterizes the impasse that the board often faces: trying to make the schools bigger and smaller simultaneously. With a public that is tough to engage even in the harshest of economic climates and with much on the line, it is not surprising that the board has to make hard decisions largely on its own. And, conversely, it is not surprising that when that board doesn't have an open and productive dialogue with the public, that public will end up surprised and sometimes displeased by the board's decisions.

So where, then, is a school system to turn?

Richards said he and other administrators are looking deeply into regionalization and other cost-containment methods related to payroll and health care. But he stressed that, given the chance, the one thing he would approach differently in the entire budget process is community participation.

"What was most hurtful about the comments that were circulating is that we've been very transparent about this process," Richards said. "I think what we need to do differently is to engage the community in a way that really prompts the dialogue of what people want for their schools...to wait until May to have a big turnout at the Town Meeting- the die is cast at that point."