Budget Cuts Finding Their Way Into Wilton Classrooms

There was little sawing and hammering at Tuesday night's budget workshop between the Boards of Finance and Education. The focus, instead, appeared to be on drawing and clarifying a conceptual blueprint from which to work.

The meeting included all members of both boards, representatives from throughout the Wilton school system, and between 15 and 20 residents in the audience that came and went during its two hour duration. The structure consisted largely of Board of Finance members posing individual questions, BOE members responding and conversations growing out of the Q & A format.

Both boards were cordial and informative and both agreed that the school system is at a point where budget restrictions and accompanying budget cuts are starting to visibly affect student experience and the quality of the education provided to them.

"The degree to which I can find any fat in the budget...there's none there," said BOF member Al Alper. "Frankly, in reading through the budget message and the various foundational assumptions...we're starting to cut into the quality of the education we deliver to the kids...the reality is that this budget is about as bare bones as you can get and I would argue that it's probably cut too deep already."

Alper continued on to say that the boards should shift their focus from fat-trimming to a reexamination of how various services are provided. That ideological shift, he said, should include looking into specific line items and "seeing how we deliver something and if we can do it cheaper."

Board of Finance members also pushed school officials and the BOE to do more forecasting, including providing three-year budget assumptions and extending other monetary forecasts as far as possible, so as to develop a better sense at present of where the school system is headed in the future and where proverbial road blocks and potholes might appear.

The night generally avoided specific figures and dollar amounts with the understanding that everyone would be better served with time to research those numbers, get them right, and then exchange them via email.

A summary of some of the more topically specific discussions has been provided below.

Long-Term Planning

• Andy Pforzheimer: "I think this year we're having larger divergence in terms of what we proposed [budgetarily] and what we're looking to bring to the town than in any of the other years I've been here...the last three or four years, we/I have been talking about the structural cost curve of the education system and the available money and how at some point they're not sustainable together. This may be that point, maybe it's next year...I am disappointed this year to see what I think is cutting and clipping around the edges, which is now in everybody's estimation starting to affect core and structural parts of the school system...I haven't seen anything structurally different presented that makes me think that next year we're not going to be back here only with the little cuts even more detrimental to the kids...instead of asking all the small dollar questions (which I will ask in an email), I would like to know what, if any structural issues have been discussed that can bring what the school system wants and what the town can afford into balance. I cannot imagine that there is a solution to this that doesn't involve bringing the teachers in as collaborators, rather than as someone across the table."
• Dr. Gary Richards: "Eighty percent of our budget is salary and administration benefits. Clearly that's where the big dollars are...I think it's important to note that in looking at what we're doing, there are assumptions that we operate with...I think one of the challenges we face is that we are a care-giving organization with 4,260 kids...depending on circumstances, we can't always handle things efficiently if efficient means cheaper and quicker."
• BOF Member Gail Lavielle: "If you look into the future, so many of these fixed costs are there and there to stay, which puts a lot of pressure on everything else, the things that we care about doing well."

Unfunded Mandates

• BOF member Jim Meinhold raised the issue of unfunded mandates and their affect on the school system. He asked if the state's legal requirements were taken away, what percentage (very roughly) of the mandates would the school system do away with and what would those cost savings be?
• Meinhold: "If all of [the regulations] went away, I'm guessing there are many things that we would continue doing even if the legal requirement weren't there...but if the cost savings was $20 million, I would think that we might all take that as a real cause to try [and bring the issue to our legislators] and enact change."
• Dr. Richards: "There are 128 different mandates that we have, about 121 of them are either underfunded or unfunded...some of the 128 mandates are reports that require half a day, some require months."
• Richards: "When we look at cost savings...we recognize the different positions...we have to balance cost savings against the missions and values policies, the requirements of the law, the capacity and resources we have...the importance of best practices, the cost benefit analysis of whatever we're trying to do and the needs and expectations of the community."
• Richards: "Our last contract with the custodians group (albeit the smallest group we negotiate with), we negotiated two years of zero salary increases and for all new employees [we instituted] defined contribution retirement plans. So I think we really should be looking out and trying to restructure similar significant cost areas."
• Richards: "We've never assumed that the way we do things is the best way it can be done."

Snow Days

• Richards said that he would like to see the State Department of Education look into its school year length requirements. He said that this year has been particularly challenging because of the weather-associated delays and cancellations. The state has strict standards about the number of school days students must log to complete a school year. Richards said the state department should look at being more flexible in terms of how those days are made up for to account for such extenuating circumstances. 

Volunteerism

• A question was posed about the school system using volunteers to help fill needs and vacant positions more effectively.
• Richards: "One of the issues with volunteers is that there are labor law implications for taking work that had been bargaining unit work have that done a volunteer way."
• Richards pointed out that the school system already receives 33,000 hours of volunteer work from the PTA alone.

Student/Teacher Ratios

• Pforzheimer said that the ratio of teachers to students was the same last year as it was in 2004. His following question, then, was is there a way to measure how changes in that ratio specifically affect student experience and learning?
• WHS Principal Tim Canty: "Over the last ten years or prior, student/teacher ratios averaged 15.1...because of last year's budget cuts, that rose to a ratio of 15.6, so there was a substantial increase."
• BOE member Dick Dubow: "Intuitively, it has to mean a less individualized experience for that child."
• BOF Chairman Warren Serenbetz: "Creating individualized experiences for kids is great, particularly if you have a never-ending bucket of money to spend, but I would argue that there is a line to draw where you stop creating an individualized experience for every single kid...it isn't possible anymore to give each and every kid an unlimited, individualized experience."
• Dubow: "I think we have a program that has achieved a reasonable balance, as we continue to chip away, we will diminish that."
• Richards: "I think individualism is something that we've talked about as we've learned more about outcomes...adding more to a teacher/student ratio increases the workload on that teacher and adding to the load makes it harder to differentiate instruction...one of the thins we have to look at- in the last 10 years, there's been a much larger percentage of our students with learning disabilities (about 425 kids) and most of those kids are in mainstream classes."
• As a point of clarification, Richards was saying that children with learning disabilities naturally add to a teacher's workload and further diminish the individualized attention they can provide to every student. While the school system provides for students' special needs, an increase in the student/teacher ratio coupled with such needs could overburden the teacher.
• Canty: "We did lose 2.9 teachers as a result of budget reductions [last year]. I did want to make it very clear that that's not around the edges. We're into the classroom."

Course Offerings/Foreign Languages

• Canty: "We're successfully retiring courses. We're now, for the third year, unsuccessfully bringing in new programs...that's affecting our ability to provide a cutting-edge education."
• Canty said that while budget constraints are forcing the school system to phase out languages like French and pull back on faculty development, an equally disturbing trend is the system's inability to offer new courses to challenge students and attract prospective families. He said a parent night for incoming ninth graders recently, a parent specifically asked him why Wilton was not offering similar new courses as some other surrounding towns were.
• BOF member Lynne Vanderslice asked Canty where Wilton stacked up in terms of its course offerings compared to other local schools.
• Canty: "The primary area of concern has been in the are of world languages. The question of [adding] Mandarin, for example, has been on the docket for a while...there are also other issues that come up in referencing town comparisons that relate to technology that are of some concern."

Jewelry Making

• Canty: "The infamous jewelry making course I'm hearing so much about...class size in that course is 19 currently, but it includes multiple courses and sections in that classroom and the needs to differentiate."
• Canty was responding to a question about how the school system accommodates class offerings with lower participation. He said in some instances, as with jewelry making, a teacher will have a number of students taking different levels of a course in the same classroom and the responsibility to provide the appropriate level of instruction falls to that teacher. He also said that some courses, like AP Music Theory, are offered every other year.