Context Is Everything

The irony of the most recent installment of the Board of Education’s continuing contretemps with their elected counterparts in town government is that in any normal context this issue would not stir an eyebrow. At its last meeting before the end of the fiscal year, the school board decided to award nominal (or in some cases nonexistent) raises, and assorted other compensatory perks to administrators and nonunion employees. The perks for top administrators added up to just under $50,000, which looks like pin money next to the $66 million approved for school expenditures by voters this spring.

But context is everything. And this year the context was anything but normal: sacrifice was the watchword in the public review of the town and school budgets; town unions and nonunion employees gave up raises; and town expenditures were reduced to below 2008-2009 levels on the town side of the budget ledger. Out in the community, beyond the public sector, those lucky enough to hang on to their jobs were losing health insurance benefits and agreeing to salary reductions, hoping to weather the economic storm ravaging the country and the world.

This was a year when taxpayers really needed a break, and town and school officials appeared to be working hard to come through for them. There was a sense that we are all in this together, and if everyone gives up a little, we will make it through another year. It seemed like school district administrators got the message. They made a big show of requesting a wage freeze for themselves and repeatedly swore the budget was as tight as they could make it without significantly eroding the educational experience of Newtown students. Yet in the small type of terse meeting minutes following a closed door session of the school board in their last meeting before the end of the fiscal year, we learned of nonunion salary increases and a gift basket of annuities, stipends, and car allowances for top administrators.

The Board of Education’s response to the inevitable outcry by town employees who had no such bundle of blessings waiting for them in the new fiscal year seemed particularly tone deaf. Caught in the headlights handing out cash and considerations to some of the town’s highest paid employees, the school board’s response (for those members who bothered to respond) was the equivalent of the blank stare — as if to ask incredulously, What? Is there some problem with this? There were rationalizations about the need to smooth out pension complexities and how hard people had worked and how highly paid expertise was saving the town even more money. There was even the “found money” explanation, which in the words of one school board member, gave them “the funds to do right by our nonunion employees.”

This last comment points directly at the underlying problem with the Board of Education. The school board has a sense that there are some employees who are ours and other employees who are also working directly for local taxpayers who are not ours. So when it comes time to “do right,” other people who are making sacrifices, whether they are property taxpayers or hardworking town employees, are not part of the calculation.

The community will be much better off once it manages to rid the Board of Education of its us vs. them siege mentality. Even now, as the school board looks ahead to the next rounds of contract negotiations, it is doing its best limit the participation of the Board of Finance — another senseless turf war in the making.

This year, it appears there will again be some competition for open seats on the Board of Education. Let’s think carefully about how best to integrate all our town’s needs and priorities as we decide how to fill those seats. And let’s not forget: the context is the community.