BOE Cuts $900,000—

School Board Reductions Pass Unanimously

By John Voket

 Tuesday evening’s Board of Education budget deliberation was a tightrope walk for officials who came to the table with suggested reductions and good news about found revenue that added up to the $900,000 required to meet the 2008 budget approved by voters April 22.

During a marathon meeting that reportedly stretched until midnight, School Superintendent Janet Robinson made a couple of things perfectly clear. She directed Business Manager Ronald Bienkowski to craft reductions that would have minimal impact on staff who worked directly with students, and despite a quarter-million-dollar cut to the technology line, she asked to conserve enough to lay a required foundation of computer servers that will enhance the performance and utility of all future IT installations at the classroom level.

The board clearly approached the task of meeting this reduction — proposed to the Legislative Council through the finance board earlier this year — ruefully, having previously expressed that its original approved spending plan of $66,931,044 represented a good faith effort to present the lowest possible operating budget.

Despite some initial concerns expressed during Tuesday’s meeting by David Nanavaty about technology and staffing cuts, and following many questions from the rest of the board, all six members unanimously endorsed a package of budget adjustments on May 6 that totaled $900,000 to the penny.

The greatest assistance to their effort came as a result of reported savings in the Anthem health care policy renewal, which was locked in at $222,190 less than originally anticipated. This added revenue was the most significant of nine “technical adjustments” the superintendent had hinted at previously in The Newtown Bee.

Saying the final budget after the $900,000 cut represents the district’s best “estimate of what we believe we will be spending,” Dr Robinson then began detailing the balance of this first phase of her suggested reductions, along with a half-dozen modest increases adding up to a net $351,594.

The next greatest cut of $74,145 will be derived from savings due to known staff turnover as of May 6, followed by $57,110 in expected savings from electricity conservation, and participation in a load response program the district recently launched.

Mr Bienkowski explained that because the district purchases its electrical generation from an independent supplier, he successfully entered into a program that rebates cash whenever district facilities can be taken off-line during times of peak usage, typically during the hottest summer days.

The business manager said that upon notification of a high peak warning, each district building equipped with a power generator would temporarily fire up and generate its own power, thereby cutting the demand to the Constellation supplier.

The district has already received between $30,000 and $35,000 for the current fiscal year, and Mr Bienkowski told the board he expects the savings to generate more than $47,000 in the 2008-09 fiscal cycle.

Dr Robinson continued adding back $26,962 from a custodial contract settlement; $23,696 from an anticipated in-school suspension which will not be mandated in the coming school year; $24,655 from eliminating a one-on-one nurse position at Reed Intermediate School, $15,000 from recycling savings, along with a lower water rate assessment and savings on a Reed School oil recovery system.

According to a worksheet distributed after the meeting, anticipated increases in dental insurance rates ($10,201), workers compensation insurance ($5,580), paraprofessionals for transportation at Sandy Hook School ($7,172), tuition ($30,170), diesel fuel for busses ($5,791) and natural gas for the Reed heating system ($43,000) weighed against the suggested reductions.

Moving to other district reductions, Dr Robinson reminded the school board that before finding the aforementioned technical cuts, she was “looking at staff cuts across the board.”

“But my bias was to protect the people who work directly with the kids,” the superintendent added. Noting that the $146,000 in facility and site cuts still leaves the district with more maintenance funds than last year, Dr Robinson explained that school facilities director Gino Faiella found several projects that could either be postponed or done by district staff to achieve the savings while still delivering critical maintenance and improvements.

Moving to the quarter-million in technology cuts, Dr Robinson insisted that the phase 1 plans to replace decade old servers will be achieved.

“These are improvements that are behind the scenes,” she said. “This is not something you are going to walk into the school and see on the desktops. But it’s most essential to the building we want to do in our technology program.”

Enough money was conserved, however, to cover long-awaited technology upgrades at Head O’ Meadow and Middle Gate School.

Additional adjustments approved by the board included $10,575 from activity budgets for track, cheerleading, and culinary arts; $35,415 in school bus contract savings, another $10,000 in bus driver salaries; $25,906 from reductions to the paraprofessionals line, cutting the $64,092 salary for one elementary level social worker; $4,000 in added revenue from civic activity and facility use fees; and another $2,418 in estimated additional staff turnover.

Under questions from Mr Nanavaty, who said he was afraid to see the social worker cut for fear it would not be restored in the future, Dr Robinson said the elementary social worker program districtwide needed to be done, but “done right.”

The superintendent said the district would begin enforcing mandatory charges to organizations using school facilities. She noted the rumor of “handshake agreements” that absolved certain users from remitting the overtime fees to cover custodial staff on evenings and weekends.

She noted that the annual Relay For Life was among activities that would be expected to adhere to the written policy for fee reimbursements.