Finance Board Member Reports On School Strategic Planning Experience

By John Voket

Martin Gersten pulled no punches in his report to fellow Newtown Board of Finance members January 12, updating his volunteer efforts as a member of the school district’s long-term strategic planning subcommittee studying the district’s capital improvement planning.

“It is an exercise by well-meaning people who are attempting to reinvent the wheel,” Mr Gersten related as the finance board meeting drew to a close last Monday. “And to usurp the powers of both the Board of Education and the Board of Finance in determining how one should best develop a capital improvement plan both philosophically and conceptually.”

Mr Gersten said the panel appears to be ignoring the issue he believed the group should have been directed toward, which was determining the appropriate way to advise the school board to get their capital planning ideas heard and adopted by the other agencies that form Newtown’s core government.

Based on his experience with the Board of Education or members of it coming forward with capital proposals, Mr Gersten observed, “They go head-to-head with everybody. They show up with a point of view and you’re stuck with it — everything’s a fight.”

He said his subcommittee seems to be engaging in a series of “mental exercises” on what the statutes provide on the CIP; what the town’s ordinances are; the history of those developments; and “what is a rational basis for capital versus operating expenses.”

“So, I don’t think they are going to develop anything that is of great value to us or the Board of Education. Although it’s probably informative to the people involved,” Mr Gersten said.

Superintendent of School Janet Robinson said she found Mr Gersten’s observations to be “quite interesting.” In regard to his contentions about the effectiveness of his committee, Dr Robinson responded that the strategic planning mission overall is to create an overlay, or a long-term process for managing district facilities.

“It’s not about [usurping] power,” she said. “It’s about volunteers being thoughtful and doing their best to determine priorities.”

While Dr Robinson said she is not attending meetings or positioned to influence the committee’s outcomes, she expects the end result to define a process for strategic planning, not inventing or reinventing a far-reaching capital plan.

Responding to Mr Gersten’s comments about the confrontational nature of the school board, Dr Robinson said, “If that is his perception, it’s probably a good thing we are looking at the process. Maybe there are some improvements to be made.”

Board of Education member Kathleen Chrystie, who also heads the Strategic Planning Committee’s Capital Improvement Plan Subcommittee, said the group is currently researching its topic. She said the committee has spent the last three to four weeks researching the topics that surround the school district’s Capital Improvement Plan (CIP).

“What it has to do with is the process with which the school district puts together is CIP,” said Ms Chrystie.

The committee, according to Ms Chrystie, is looking into the best way to prioritize and correctly put together the district’s CIP each year.

Ms Chrystie said the committee is not looking to address it or change it, but to improve how the CIP is compiled.

Mr Gersten further commented that the capital planning committee’s effort probably will not contribute to solving the kind of problem the town is currently having with the protracted process of developing a high school expansion.

Finance Chairman John Kortze, whose wife, Tara, serves on the subcommittee with Mr Gersten, said the committee to date has only interviewed Mr Gersten, school business manager Ron Bienkowski, Superintendent Janet Robinson, and Assistant Superintendent Linda Gejda, but he has not heard about any discussion about the roles any other elected officials play in the capital appropriation process.

“We have some legislative authority, the council has some legislative authority...I worry, and I hope they develop a scenario that is conducive with the statutes, and [considering] the fact that these other boards and commissions exist, and understand the process everybody else goes through” in the capital improvement development process.

A source close to the school’s strategic planning panel, who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the group, said those observations had already been qualified internally on the committee, and there was a commitment made to expand the interview process beyond just school district staff and administrators.

Mr Kortze said that criticism he has heard about capital planning centers around the lengthy process by which proposals and spending requests are vetted with multiple rounds of examination and deliberation by several local board and commissions is unfounded. He said most of Connecticut’s towns and cities have finance boards or similar panels that handle capital project vetting in the same way.

“[The criticism] seems to be short sighted,” Mr Kortze said. “One might view [the local process] as a pretty solid path of checks and balances.”

In closing, Mr Kortze said going forward, he hopes the school’s strategic planning committee, and its various subcommittees including the capital planning panel, gets out and meets with the finance board, the selectmen, and members of the council “to understand what really takes place.” Ms Chrystie said Mr Kortze has accepted an invitation to attend the panel’s January 28 meeting.

Last fall, the first strategic plan for the Newtown school district started to take shape as 30 members of the community spent long hours debating the ideal set of goals and beliefs for the school system.

According to school board Vice Chairman Lillian Bittman, the strategic plan is a way to assess where the district could move forward as a whole. She said it helps to assess each concern and question for its relevance to the strategic plan of the school district.

Dr Robinson said the school system covered the expense for the weekend. During the meetings, held on October 2, 3, and 4, the group was separated into smaller groups and they were each asked to come up with their own answers as to what they believe should be Newtown’s priorities.

Each group then presented their findings back to the whole.

The strategic plan was broken down into five areas by the 30 members of the group, and for each of the five different concepts volunteers like Mr Gersten and Ms Kortze were recruited to work on specific topics like capital planning.

The initial draft of the plan included beliefs, mission statements, objectives, strategies, and parameters that can be used to help the district grow.