Making The Case For The NHS Expansion

When the Board of Selectmen voted 2-1 Monday against a $38.8 million appropriation for the proposed expansion of Newtown High School, it looked like a serious setback to efforts by the Board of Education to alleviate overcrowding at the school. In the long run, however, the selectmen may have done the school board a favor. By introducing turbulence at this stage of the funding process, the selectmen have inspired proponents of this project to marshal their forces and their best arguments to ultimately prevent a complete crash landing of high school expansion project when it eventually goes to a townwide referendum.

As they have done before, Selectmen Paul Mangiafico and Herb Rosenthal, both former school board members, found themselves at odds with First Selectman Joe Borst. This time, the two selectmen had lingering questions about student enrollment projections for the high school, wondering whether the school board had arbitrarily adopted the highest enrollment numbers from a low-middle-high range of projections simply to justify the scale and scope of its expansion plan. The two selectmen also had questions and concerns about the recent dramatic inflation of annual operating costs for the expansion from $670,000 to more than $2 million.

These are questions that could have been passed on to the voters, as the out-voted first selectman advocated. The highly politicized run-up to a referendum vote, however, is a difficult time to work out a consensus on what constitutes a prudent balance between overtaxed property and an overcrowded high school. If the Board of Education looks like it is just shooting for the moon with this project, taxpayers who have just spent a long, cold winter watching their property values stall or decline in a tough housing market, their financial reserves sag in stock markets burdened by uncertainty, and their overall economic confidence evaporate, are not going to buy it. Last year, those same taxpayers rejected three budgets before they approved a pared down spending plan. This year, they are likely to be even tougher customers. And the school board will not have the luxury of coming back quickly and repeatedly with amended proposals, as is the case with budgets.

Frankly, there are no legitimate arguments against the need for more space at the high school. The problem, long apparent to students, their parents, and educators, looms over the school’s accreditation in the form of a warning from the accrediting agency, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. There are, however, legitimate questions about how much extra space is needed and for what programs and services. It would be a grave mistake for this town to reject a high school expansion project in a referendum vote or to derail the project so it never even makes it to a vote. There is too much at stake for the school board and Newtown’s financing authorities to put forward an expansion plan supported by anything less than a rock-solid foundation of rationale and reasoning for every cent of spending associated with it.

The Board of Selectmen’s insistence this week on more rigorous scrutiny of the town’s most expensive capital project to date will give the school board an opportunity to make its best case to a small audience of skeptics before facing the more fateful judgment of the larger audience of skeptics that constitute Newtown’s electorate. We hope and expect the Board of Education will emerge from this tussle with the selectmen with stronger arguments for its current plan or a different plan more likely to secure the approval of taxpayers.