The School Board’s Awkward Position

Newtown’s Board of Education was in the same awkward position as the unprepared student called on by the teacher: it didn’t know the answer.

The teacher in this instance was the Board of Finance, which wanted to know the school board’s financial priority. Is it the planned climate control project at Hawley School or the expansion of the high school? That was over a month ago. After weeks of indecision and a marathon session Tuesday night that nearly ended in a stalemate, the board finally made a decision: the Hawley project should come first.

The Board of Education has tangled repeatedly with Newtown’s budgetmakers on the Board of Finance and Legislative Council in recent weeks, seeking to get the authorizations it needs to fully fund the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) project at Hawley, which is severely underbudgeted. The town had planned to spend $3.3 million for the project and had already included the first year of debt service funding for the expense in its 2005-2006 budget. But in September, the school board was back asking the finance board for an additional $2.1 million for the same project.

The Board of Education’s wildly inaccurate projection for the cost of the Hawley HVAC project, along with its tardiness in coming up with a $41 million cost projection for the high school expansion slated for inclusion in the bonding package for next year’s budget, set off alarms for the Board of Finance, which is already hunching under the town’s debt ceiling. The school board was making decisions and pressing for unspecified expenditures at the high school that could drive the town’s debt above accepted norms and jeopardize its financial rating on Wall Street, potentially costing Newtown’s taxpayers millions in debt service charges in the years to come. Finance Director Benjamin Spragg summed it up in his understated way: “There is a need for discipline when it comes to incurring more debt.”

Unfortunately, the Board of Education has not been a model of discipline. Last week, a consultant to the school board on the Hawley project told the Legislative Council that he alerted school officials as early as last December that the cost projections for the Hawley project were far too low. Rather than raise the issue during budget deliberations, however, those school officials let the town’s voters believe the project’s costs would still be $3.3 million when it came time to approve the debt service expenditures in the 2005-2006 budget last spring. The school board chairman subsequently explained that those school officials never relayed the consultant’s early warning of escalating costs to the board. She said the board only learned of the $2.1 shortfall in its projections when it opened bids in August. It is awkward, indeed, for a board to have to defend itself by claiming that it didn’t know what was going on in its own offices.

The Board of Finance is scheduled to meet once more with the school board this week, after The Bee goes to press, to again discuss its financial plans. Like the student, out of extensions, cramming at the last minute, the school board belatedly established its priorities and quickly came up with a high school expansion cost projection that seemed to jump from $29.7 million to $41 million between Monday and Wednesday, just in the nick of time for its next appointment with the Board of Finance. This kind of last-minute, under-the-gun financial planning certainly does not inspire confidence among taxpayers.

Normally, we would look to the democratic process for an answer to inadequacy in our local government. An election campaign is the perfect opportunity to demand answers and accountability from our elected officials. It is easy enough to vote for the people who have the answers and pass over the ones who don’t. But Newtown’s political parties didn’t want to have a school board election this year, choosing instead to nominate only enough candidates to make every seat on the Board of Education uncontested.

Now, that puts us all in the awkward position of having no answer to the question of how to improve Newtown’s Board of Education.