The proposed 2025-26 Education budget includes cuts to 28.11 full-time equivalent positions, Superintendent of Schools Anne Uberti revealed as she detailed a proposal to Board of Education members during their Tuesday, January 14, meeting.

The budget proposal totals $92,619,033 — a roughly $5,209,967 (5.96 percent) increase over the current year.

The proposed staffing reductions would result in $1,461,002 (1.67 percent) savings in the 2025-26 budget, and are already included in the aforementioned budget proposal number.

These cuts include: four general education teachers — one from elementary and three from Newtown High School, the Kindergarten Readiness program — which cuts a general education teacher and a special education teacher — one guidance counselor at the high school, the Spanish program at the elementary and intermediate level, and a social worker at the intermediate level.

And also: two special education teachers — tentatively labeled to be determined, two tech paras — one at Reed Intermediate School and another at Newtown Middle School — an administrative assistant at the high school, a payroll/accounts payable position and a cafe bookkeeper position from the business office, a sub-calling stipend currently paid to an employee to find substitutes, and two custodians — location to be determined.

“I want to say, I care deeply for the staff of Newtown Public Schools, and never could have imagined being in this situation,” Uberti said.

She continued by saying that she has been working to minimize the loss of jobs to the degree that she is able. As positions have been vacated this year, Uberti said that they have either not filled them or filled them with temporary staff when possible to avoid job loss for permanent employees.

Uberti also noted that the district has offered an early retirement program incentive with the hopes of creating openings that can be absorbed as reductions and, in turn, save people’s jobs.

“Still, you cannot cut 28 positions and not cost people their jobs, and it pains me to do so,” Uberti said.

She added that every employee whose jobs will be impacted has been a valuable asset to Newtown Public Schools.

“These are extremely difficult decisions, and they have been made with extraordinary care and thoughtful deliberations about what is best for our entire school district, but that doesn’t make it any easier for anyone involved,” Uberti said.

Concerning the reduction of the four general education teachers, as well as the guidance counselor at the high school, Uberti said that she and her team feel it is appropriate given enrollment projections for next year.

The district’s Kindergarten Readiness program was designed to be a play-based program designed for students before they enter kindergarten after state legislation raised the age children can start public school kindergarten in 2023.

While Uberti said that she believes the program has value, she believes that they “can absorb those students into our existing kindergarten classes and provide them with the same essential services.”

For the elimination of the elementary and intermediate Spanish program, Uberti said that, given current staffing and enrollment numbers, “this will be absorbed by the other specials of library, PE, music, and art."

The two special education teachers Uberti said are tentatively from Reed and the high school, but is labeled as to be determined so that they can “more accurately analyze caseload numbers in spring to determine needs across the buildings.”

Uberti also mentioned cutting four special education paras at the educational level, but clarified that these positions are currently vacant. She said they’ve been able to meet the needs of the students’ IEPs through creative and efficient scheduling, so they’re proposing eliminating them.

The reduction of the sub-calling stipend will be used to offset a new automated substitute management system, according to Uberti.

The cuts also include four lead teachers at the elementary level, as well as a special education supervisor and a special education board-certified behavior analyst. However, Uberti clarified that these positions will be reallocated into elementary assistant principals, which are new positions that she proposed for in this budget.

Uberti said that these elementary assistant principals will serve as assistant principals and also assume responsibility for the oversight of special education in each building.

She also discussed proposals for a dean of students at the high school, an additional classroom teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary school, and the addition of an English-Language Arts teacher.

Impact Of Non-Discretionary Costs

Opening a budget with the elimination of 28 positions is something that Uberti said has “never happened in my 12 years in the district.”

Uberti shared that, due to the “extraordinary” increases in non-discretionary costs, “the only way to move the needle is to reduce staff.”

Non-discretionary costs, Uberti said, are essential costs that cannot be avoided or redacted. She said that the major driver of the pressures this year is health insurance, which alone represents a $2,420,115 increase — a 23.57% increase compared to how much it cost in last year’s budget.

The unprecedented rise in cost for insurance, Uberti said, is related to the premium costs based on the projection of plans. She explained that the town moved to a self-insured plan for 2010-11, which brought the cost of medical and dental benefits down by 18.67 percent from the previous year.

While Uberti said this afforded great savings for many years to come, she added that the cost of health insurance started to go up “pretty significantly” starting in 2023-24. In that year alone, health insurance costs went up by 7.75 percent compared to the previous year.

She cited a statistic from The Wall Street Journal that stated health insurance costs have nationally increased by an average of seven percent for the past two years; a growth rate “not experienced in more than a decade.”

Uberti described other non-discretionary costs such as contractual obligations at $2,281,356, energy at $320,395, out-of-district tuition for special education at $306,345, and more.

Layering on all of the non-discretionary increases to the current 2024-25 school budget of $87,409,066 left Uberti and her team with a starting 2025-26 school budget of $94,286,669 before reductions.

The bottom line, she said, is that before they added anything, they began by looking at an almost eight percent increase in the budget.

“Each of the proposed reductions have been thoroughly discussed with my team and brought forward to everyone tonight with our belief that these can be named with minimal impact to any of [our district’s] critical priorities,” Uberti said.

“Extraordinary Pressures”

As BOE Chair Alison Plante shared that night, the meeting marked the first session discussing the district’s proposed spending plan for the upcoming school year.

She also shared that Uberti has kept the BOE informed throughout the budget development process, and thus BOE members were already aware of the “extraordinary pressures on the budget this year.”

Uberti said that the budget proposal reflects months of thoughtful analysis, collaboration, and dedication from her team as they work to “align our financial priorities with our district’s mission to provide a high quality education for every student.”

For her presentation, Uberti broke the shared mission statement into two parts: to inspire each student to excel, achieve personal success, and contribute to a dynamic global community, and to ensure access to quality instruction and promote a culture of continuous improvement for students to become active and engaged citizens of the local community.

She noted that the second part of the mission calls them to remember that a school budget must be more than a financial plan, and that it should be a “reflection of the commitment we are making to our students, staff, and community.”

In turn, Uberti explained that she and her team carefully considered the guiding principles of the district, as well as its strategic priorities, when planning the proposal. She outlined critical priorities such as addressing the diverse needs of the student population, maintaining a high level of safety and security, committing to reasonable class sizes, ensuring high-quality teaching and learning, and more.

At the same time, Uberti said it was equally important throughout the process to acknowledge the difficult decisions they would need to make.

“It called for each one of us to act responsibly as stewards of both the educational product that we drive to deliver and the reality of the cost that it incurs,” Uberti said.

She continued by saying that the toughest part comes in knowing that “this year, we cannot have it all.”

Budget Obstacles

Uberti said that the challenges presented in drafting the budget were “clear from the start.”

She noted that this is largely due to the 2024-25 education budget failing during the initial budget referendum in late April of last year, with 1,701 No votes to 1,194 Yes votes; marking the first time a budget was voted down since 2013. The budget later passed during its second vote in May, with 2,075 Yes votes to 1,198 No votes.

The superintendent said that the impact of the failed referendum and the totality of the cuts had, in essence, “created a hole that Newtown Public Schools must crawl out of before we began building this year’s budget.”

In order to offset those reductions, Uberti said that they pre-purchased items that were originally slated to be included in this year’s budget. On one hand, she said it was a good thing that they used some of the surplus funds they had to offset this year’s budget. However, Uberti explained that this then sets up a situation in which the current budget is “artificially lowered.”

As an example, she explained that if they cut $500,000 out of curriculum instruction, that they have to put it back in the next year or else they would “have nothing in curriculum and instruction.”

Uberti said that the categories “artificially lowered” from these pre-purchases include curriculum and instruction, property and school equipment, as well as supplies for Reed Intermediate School, Newtown Middle School, and Newtown High School.

“By managing a budget in this manner, you are essentially relieving pressures in one school budget year only to create [them] in the next,” Uberti said.

Since there is no surplus anticipated this year, Uberti said that they need to bring those funds back into the budget to “continue supporting the high-quality education expected here in Newtown.”

She added, “By managing a budget in this manner, you are essentially relieving pressures in one school budget year only to create [them] in the next.”

Uberti noted that the town has also used surplus funds to pay for its building maintenance projects over the past several years. As they no longer have the surplus funds to do so, Uberti said that if they do not fund their building maintenance projects, they risk the deterioration of their facilities.

She said that she has been in districts where that has happened, and plans for that money to come back into the budget.

“Failing to put some of these expenses back into our budget now will only result in delaying the inevitable rightsizing of our budget in these important areas,” Uberti said.

Uberti noted the significant reductions in staffing in the previous budget. She described that these reductions were made in areas that wouldn’t have a direct impact on teaching and learning in order to protect the quality of students’ learning experiences.

However, she said that those reductions have made this year even more difficult because “those reductions that were made are now no longer available to us,” and have made it challenging to find places to cut that don’t impact teaching and learning.

“It may help to think of last year’s cuts as round one,” Uberti said. “It is a simple matter of fact that each round of cuts goes deeper than the ones before.”

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.