Referendum Results: Split Decision
In short: the town budget passed and the education budget failed during the April 23 referendum.
The Registrar of Voters reports 15.1% of Newtown’s registered voters participated in yesterday’s referendum, with 2,952 people showing up at Newtown Middle School to vote and another 47 turning in absentee ballots.
At the end of the day, 1,465 Yes votes were received for the $48,834,506 municipal budget vs 1,424 No votes.
On the education side, with voters deciding on a proposed $88,817,373 budget the final numbers were 1,701 No and 1,194 Yes.
On the secondary question to the education budget — If the proposed sum for the Board of Education is not approved, should the revised budget be higher? — the responses were 727 Yes and 2,071 No.
See this week’s Newtown Bee print edition for additional details.
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Managing Editor Shannon Hicks can be reached at shannon@thebee.com.
The people have spoken, time to sharpen your pencils. If we look at the town budget for guidance the BOE should cut the budget from 4.4% to 2.75% I find the voting results very interesting … We have approximately 4,030 students in our town, with a published 12:1 ratio which means we have 335 teachers. I would love to know the actual number if someone knows. If we account for their spouses that gets us very close to the number of people who voted yes for the budget and wished it would be higher (729).
Encouraging. The town budget squeaks by but the school budget got dinged. Let the games begin.
I am sorry but $88.8 million dollars to educate 4030 kids is way out of line! That’s over $22k per kid, used to be $8k per kid, the kids aren’t getting any smarter, the administration eats all the cost. Time to cut the budget by 20% and also cut the $225k salary of the superintendent and $193k of the superintendent assistant ! You can get a lot of teachers for $400k wasted for 2 overpaid positions. Common sense should tell you that spending $2.5 million per every week for population less than 30k people is just way too high! Also voting should be done by mail, enough with these nonsensical referendums where barely 16% of voters show up. 51% voters approval should be MANDATED!