Finance Chair: Taxpayers Need Rationale On Staffing Increases As Student Numbers Decline

By John Voket

After several hours of interviewing members of the Board of Education and district administrators, Board of Finance Chairman John Kortze said he still does not fully understand why the district continues to increase staffing as the overall student population plummets.

“Over the past six years we’re down 439 students, and we’re up 25-plus full-time equivalents,” he said, evoking the jargon used to differentiate full and part-time staffers. “We’re not educators, but I’d still like for us to understand the rationale.”

Mr Kortze said he was speaking for most or all of the members of his board. The officials reported receiving e-mails and questions from constituents about the disparity between the shrinking student rolls and swelling staff rosters.

The finance official said there is also little detail being offered about the benefits of increased spending for staff in specialized areas of instruction, particularly at the high school level.

“There has to be justification for this spending,” Mr Kortze said, adding that he does not want to appear that he is “beating up” on school officials. “But there are 20 more students at the high school than there were five years ago and we’ve added 25 full-time equivalents at the high school alone.”

Comparing the school district side of the budget proposal to the town side, Mr Kortze observed that the town side is “very clear.”

“There’s a vision and subscription to core values that [First Selectman Pat Llodra] doesn’t want to stray from,” he said, adding that there is no doubt in the minds of finance board members that both budget requests are lean. “But the Board of Ed side still leaves a lot of questions [unanswered].”

While questioning Superintendent Janet Robinson on her budget request March 5, Mr Kortze also asked to clarify statements Dr Robinson made regarding educational assistants or EAs.

The finance chairman referenced a tape of the June 2011 school board meeting where school board member Lillian Bittman asked about the superintendent’s justification for removing EAs from the previous year’s budget after making a case for adding them just weeks earlier during the 2011-12 budget deliberations.

Mr Kortze said that at “two hours, 27 minutes and 33 seconds into the audio” transcript of that June school board meeting, Dr Robinson told the board that her research did not validate that EAs provided an academic benefit to the students.

When asked about EAs during a March 1 budget meeting, Dr Robinson told the finance board that she did not want to lose the EAs, but she “had to find staffing reductions somewhere.” The superintendent said that a highly effective teacher in a smaller class gets better results than in a larger class with a certified teacher and an EA providing instruction.

“I didn’t want to lose teachers,” Dr Robinson said.

Mr Kortze then asked why the classrooms with personnel already deemed “highly effective” were assigned EAs in the first place, only to have them removed at the end of the 2011 school year.

Dr Robinson said those EAs were “doing a job that isn’t being done right now,” but she made the decision to retain personnel that had the greatest “effect size” on students.

“If we could aim for smaller class size and more highly effective teachers, the need for EAs decreases,” Dr Robinson said, adding that she still sees high value in employing EAs to support kindergarten teachers and special education students.

“I’m not saying there’s not a need, but the answers she is giving are different,” Mr Kortze said.

During a follow-up meeting March 5 with district officials, board member Richard Oparowski said he conducted an analysis of data and determined that the district was doing very well producing academic achievement versus dollars spent per pupil.

But Mr Oparowski said the “flip side” was from a “financial controller’s perspective,” the district appears to be getting more inefficient because it was still adding personnel as its student population is declining retracting.

“If I’m down ten percent, the first thing I look at is [reducing] administration,” Mr Oparowski said.

Dr Robinson replied that the district is “not a business,” and that the level of administrators was justified because the district had seven locations to manage, and that administrators remain “very busy” performing in-classroom evaluations of teaching staff.

Mr Oparowski then asked about reducing facilities to correspond with what finance officials described as “losing an entire class worth of students” since the district’s highest point of population in 2005. Dr Robinson replied that the population has not dropped far enough to consider consolidating facilities.

Mr Oparowski said that a chart he had showing the rapidly declining student population was “a call to action.”

“As a taxpayer, I have a greater sense of urgency,” he said.