In most families facing financial problems, there is a long sobering talk among the adults at the kitchen table about sacrifices and cutting back. Something feeling very much like that discussion took place at Monday night’s meeting of the Board of Finance. Town and school officials sat and watched while the finance board chiseled another $2.7 million out of a budget that had already been cut significantly by town and school administrators. The professionals whose standards and vision are sustained by tax dollars must have felt they were suffering a slow death by a thousand cuts.

The school district took the biggest hit; the Board of Finance pried $2.5 million more from its budget. The board recalculated “commodities” like health insurance, utilities, and grants for a savings of $1.5 million and left it up to the school board to figure out where to come up with the other million. For the Board of Education, that is not a pile of money; that is 20 teachers.

The adults at the table — not only on the town level, but in Hartford as well — are now talking about fiscal realities that require more than just incremental change. Governor M. Jodi Rell proposed a $45 million reduction in aid to municipalities last week as part of her attempt to fill a half-billion-dollar hole in the state budget. The state’s own revenue stream from income and sales taxes has been choked off by the growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed persons in Connecticut. And while economic activity in the state may be showing signs of promise, the employment picture remains dismal.

The University of Connecticut’s Center for Economic Analysis (CCEA) reported last month that Connecticut will continue to lose jobs at least through 2011 and eventual job growth will not return to the state until 2012 or later. The director of the CCEA explained it this way to The Day of New London: “We don’t have a particularly coherent economic development strategy [in Connecticut]. Forty-nine states have done better [on jobs] over the last 20 years.” Because the profitability of the state’s economy depends more and more on outsourcing work to other states and countries, paradoxically, Connecticut may end up seeing strong economic growth in the years to come without any improvement in the employment picture.

The implications are clear for suburban municipalities like Newtown, which depend more on the economic viability of individual property taxpayers than on the profit margins of its corporate and commercial citizens. The outlook is bleak for both the taxpayer and for the tax collector. Simply raising the ante each year looks like a prescription for trouble — both political and financial.

The Board of Finance is now talking more about structural than incremental changes — particularly in the way Newtown finances education. With enrollment projections declining, the board is openly discussing the closure of an elementary school and shifting fourth graders to the Reed Intermediate School. Some parents and education advocates suggest the town may need some structural changes in its political apparatus as well, calling for separate referendum votes on town and school expenditures.

As the level of sacrifice and pain ratchets up along the continuum of Newtown’s fiscal cycles, we are likely to see more calls for fundamental change in the way we spend (or save) our tax dollars. The challenge, as in all painful situations, will be to avoid the kind of reactionary change that creates two more problems for every one it solves. It will require both restraint and resolve — two qualities that have marked Newtown’s budget deliberations so far this year. We hope the streak continues with the Legislative Council’s review of the proposed budget.

The council’s hearing on the budget is slated for March 25, with subsequent budget review sessions on April 7 and 14. The budget referendum will be April 27.