Pitkoff Tells Business Women––

School District Struggles To Keep Up

With A Growing Population

By Kaaren Valenta

Newtown’s superintendent of schools sees the challenges the town faces in the years ahead to be as difficult as those he has faced in his first year on the job.

“Last year I felt like I was in the eye of a storm,” Dr Evan Pitkoff told members of the Newtown Business & Professional Women at The Homesteads at Newtown on November 3.

“We had to get a new school open in the middle of the school year, deal with a significant budget cut, and increased enrollment, and changes in the bus schedules,” he said. “But one of our biggest challenges is actually a two-edged sword. We have good schools so people want to move here.”

Dr Pitkoff said he took over his position “in a great town at a difficult time.”

“I was replacing a legend,” he said. “It is very rare for a superintendent to serve more than five years in a district today. John Reed was here for 20 years.”

The increasing school population is at the root of all of the challenges, Dr Pitkoff said.

“In Newtown, 20 percent of the population is school-age children. In most towns it is 10, 11, or 12 percent,” he said.

Dr Pitkoff said the school district has 199 more students this year, bringing the total number of students in the public schools to 5,399, compared to 3,428 in the 1990–91 school year.

Another 126 are predicted for next year, many of them at the eighth grade level.

“A lot of families with children decide to move when the oldest gets to high school age,” Dr Pitkoff said. “A few years ago the high school was expanded to accommodate 1,600 students. Next year we will be over 1,600 and the increase in enrollment won’t stop next year.”

The state bases its reimbursement to districts on an eight-year forecast and is projecting about 2,000 high school students for the year 2011–12, he said.

One option would be putting another addition on the high school to accommodate these 400 students, but it is questionable whether the building’s core facilities such as the cafeteria, the gyms, and the library could handle the additional students, he said. “Where would they eat lunch? The cafeteria, the gym, all were built to handle far fewer students.

“We are making space for six additional classrooms at the high school now by moving the computer repair facility and the district’s storage and maintenance area out,” Dr Pitkoff said. “The storage and maintenance is going to a building where the armory is [at Fairfield Hills], next to the 5/6 school. We don’t know yet where the computer repair area will be.”

To accommodate the projected 400 additional students, the school board also is looking at the possibility of space for an “academy” at Fairfield Hills, a sort of satellite high school, he said, but the plans and cost figures are very preliminary at this point, and were done only so it could be included in the town’s capital improvement plan.

Dr Pitkoff said the high school class sizes in Newtown are higher than most comparable school districts in the state. “We have less favorable teacher-student ratios and less favorable administrator-teacher ratios, so there is less supervision,” he said. “And we have a higher number of students to the number of computers available.”

Despite the challenges, the student scores on standardized tests continue to increase, he said.

“The high school scores are up. The tenth grade scores were up in all four areas and of the CMTs [Connecticut Mastery Tests] nine tests, six or seven went up and the rest stayed the same. The fourth, sixth, and eight grade scores are up, and 90 percent of our students pursue higher education.”

The state considers Newtown to be a wealthy town, and state aid is given in an inverse proportion to a town’s wealth, which means Newtown gets less, he said.

“Newtown is ranked 12th in the state’s 169 towns with a median household income of $90,000. But in our per pupil expenditure, not including buildings, we are ranked 143rd.”

All of the district’s expenses –– insurance, electricity, fuel oil, special education –– are increasing, but the district is hiring a new director of services for special education to try to find sources to save money in that area, Dr Pitkoff said. Special education services are mandated by the state and federal governments, requiring as much as a one-to-one student-teacher aide ratio for those with some handicaps.

The superintendent said the district needs to do a better job at communicating so that residents have a better understanding of the financial implications of budget cuts.

“We are an efficient school system, and we have cut our budget down to the bone,” he said.