Catastrophic Cuts

To the Editor:

Newtown School District takes another  major hit with a 2.5 million dollar cut advised by the Board of Finance.  I admit to a vested interest as my family has 100-year history in Newtown.  I’m a middle school teacher, a tax payer, and parent of two children in the district. Parents may not comprehend the full effect of these cuts.

The result of the Board of Finance vote, is the Board of Education’s  plans to remove seven teaching positions from Newtown Middle School, representing a seventh grade academic cluster, a computer teacher, and two specials teachers. The argument is that the computer teacher is redundant, and the course at Reed is sufficient. Yet many of my students struggle with simple programs. Studies necessitate spiraling curriculum.  Brain research suggests that learning is best accomplished through repetition at discrete time intervals.

 Mr. Portnoy says that per pupil expenditure is not indicative of success, while the fact remains that we spend nearly a thousand dollars less per student than the average district in our DRG. We rank 137 in expenditure out of 169 districts in the state, while ranking 43 in the ability to pay. Even with this lower than average expenditure, our CMT scores are higher than  both our DRG  averages and state district averages as evidenced in our Strategic School Reports. How much longer can we be expected to achieve higher than average scores with less than average resources? There is a breaking point.

Class size certainly has a huge impact on learning. Student population at the NMS will be greater by four next year.  Imagine my class-size growing from twenty-two to near thirty and expecting that I will have the same ability to educate individual students. Will these students’ have the same opportunity to learn when competing for attention? It seems this BoF has little experience with the realities faced by classroom teachers.

Do the residents of Newtown  realize that our school system is considered a premier school system? A reputation that has taken years to build, yet it has taken only a year for the Board of Finance to erode ours. How many years of cuts can a school district absorb before becoming ineffective?

Mr. Gaston has a valid point, suggesting that without financial backing, the town’s desire to be among the top two or three districts will difficult. As a teacher, he is certainly correct as it becomes difficult to meeting educational needs of our children when  so many teaching positions are being eliminated  How is it that we as a town give so much power to a body of men with little experience in education, who ignore the advice of their own Board of Education?  Where are the studies to back these catastrophic cuts?  I strongly urge parents to attend the Legislative Council meetings and to voice their opinions. Once the budget goes to a vote, it will be too late to reverse the cuts.

Jason Adams

73 Bennett’s Bridge Road, Sandy Hook                     March 23, 2010