Montville warned to comply with budget requirement

Superintendent seeks waiver of $355k penalty

Montville Superintendent Brian Levesque was one of six superintendents statewide to receive a Feb. 22 letter stating their district is not in compliance with the state Department of Education’s minimum budget requirement.

But Levesque has taken issue with how the requirement was calculated, believing it unjust that it doesn’t factor in the “holdback” in education funding that Gov. Dannel Malloy announced in November.

Hoping to avoid a financial penalty of $355,012 for noncompliance, he has asked the department to reconsider its stance and has requested a waiver.

The MBR requires a school district to appropriate at least the same amount for education as it did the previous year, with certain limited exceptions. The Department of Education “provides mid-year notice to towns of potential non-compliance so they have time to address any shortfall,” department spokesman Peter Yazbak said in an email.

The department’s chief financial officer, Kathy Dempsey, sent the letters to Montville, Groton, Canterbury, Southington, Killingly and Watertown.

Yazbak said three of those towns, including Groton, are now in compliance, and the state is working with the other three. He is confident they will reach a resolution.

In June of last year, Montville passed an education budget based on the assumption that Education Cost Sharing funds from the state would be funded at the same level as the previous year.

When the General Assembly finally passed a budget in October, the ECS allocation to Montville was reduced by $629,481. In its calculations of the

MBR, the Department of Education lists this as the district’s ECS decrease.

But the state budget required the governor to make further cuts, and in doing so, Montville was slapped with a “holdback” of another $1,023,764.

That brings the ECS decrease to $1,653,245. If this figure were applied to the MBR calculations, Montville — which approved a decreased education budget in December — would be over the MBR by $846,258. But it wasn’t, and the state says the town is under the minimum by $177,506.

In a March 20 letter to Dempsey, Levesque said the term “holdback” implies the money eventually would be restored, but throughout the spring, it became clear that would not be the case.

“I believe that it is completely irresponsible of the State of Connecticut to change their stance on MBR based on these ‘holdbacks’ and this threat is placing our town and schools budget at great risk for additional harm,” Levesque wrote.

The “additional harm” he refers to would be Montville losing $355,012 in its ECS grant

next year. That’s because state law mandates that the penalty for noncompliance with the MBR shall be twice the shortfall, which in this case involves doubling $177,506.

Levesque said news of the violation “came as a complete shock,” in part due to prior conversations with the Department of Education, and urged the department to factor the holdback into calculation

of the MBR.

In a Feb. 2 letter to superintendents, Dempsey said that holdbacks ordered by the executive branch “do not count as state ‘aid reductions’ for purposes of MBR, and thus, towns are not permitted to reduce education appropriations by holdback amounts.”

Yazbak confirmed that the holdback won’t be restored this fiscal year.

“Our fiscal and legal departments are working internally to review Mr. Levesque’s request,” he said, “and they’re going to see what’s possible in existing statute to see if there’s some way to work things out.”

He stressed that districts won’t be in violation of the MBR until the fiscal year is over on July 1.

Groton Superintendent Michael Graner received a letter stating that his town was out of compliance by $1,568,239 and would lose $3,136,478 if it didn’t meet the MBR, but this was merely the result of a breakdown in communication.

After finding out in the fall that Groton was an Alliance District and would be getting more ECS money, Graner repeatedly stressed that the town would lose $3.1 million in education aid next year if it didn’t approve the additional $1.57 million this year. The Town Council unanimously approved this amount on Jan. 2.

Graner said he notified a Department of Education official, but somehow wires got crossed and Groton received a noncompliance letter in error.