Schools need to cut $3M, district says

GREENWICH — The Board of Education has to cut its proposed operating budget by more than $3 million to fall within the Board of Estimate and Taxation Budget Committee’s guidelines.

“It’s a challenge,” schools Superintent Toni Jones said at the board’s Thursday night meeting. “It’s programmatic, it’s people and I know in the guidelines they ask us to do it just through natural attrition. ($3.2 million) is not going to be done through natural attrition. I can assure you that. We will be as thoughtful as we can in what we put in front of the board.”

Jones presented the $194,226,990 operating budget at the board’s Nov. 2 budget meeting, telling the school board that she had not received guidelines from the BET. Her budget called for a 6.5 percent increase from last year’s operating budget.

The BET’s guidelines, released Wednesday, call for a 4.3 percent increase for the school district over last year’s budget. The amount could change, but is a starting point, finance board members said.

Blaize Levitan, the district’s chief operating officer, said that the school district can use nearly $800,000 in American Rescue Plan funds for curriculum enhancement, which could drop the increase to about 6.1 percent, but that still means the budget does not meet the BET’s guidelines.

BOE member Kathleen Stowe, who is on the board’s budget committee, said the committee has started discussing ways to reduce the operating budget, including changing the preschool ratio of special education students to general education students.

Right now, 60 percent of a pre-kindergarten class is gen

eral education students and 40 percent is special education students. The district could change the ratio to 50-50, which could save the district $184,000, she said.

Board member Karen Kowalski asked Jones to clarify if the change would be “out of line with corresponding districts.”

Jones said Greenwich Public Schools is the only one that uses the 60-40 guideline when compared with other Fairfield County districts she’s contacted.

“In order to have a 50-50 (class), we’re sitting at 15 (students), so you will probably bump to 16 (students), so you

could go eight (general education students) and eight (special education students),” Jones said.

Jones said the change will help enrollment because the district has a pre-kindergarten waitlist of 150 to 200 children every year, so increasing each class by one student may open up some extra spots.

Board member Laura Kostin said she was against the proposed change: “It does not provide the kind of attention that children with special needs would need if we’re not going to change the staffing ratio.

“Some classes are already over what the ratio is supposed to be, or at least they were last year, I can tell you,” she said. “So I would not be in favor of making that change to our ratio,

especially for our youngest and most vulnerable students.”

The district could reduce the advanced learning program science hours at the elementary school level, which would save $404,759, according to the budget document presented last month.

The district would “just (move) everybody’s science in K-5 back to general education class time,” Jones said. The change should not pose much of a problem at the elementary level except to delay the youngest students from using an advanced curriculum. The advanced science classes would still be available in middle and high school, she said.

Board member Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony said it would be helpful for the school

board to get guidance from district administrators about where they would be OK seeing budget reductions. That way, the board could make educated decisions before the the budget moved to other town boards.

“In a worst case scenario, we don’t make that decision and then the BET does ... I think we need to have option A, B and C here,” Mercanti-Anthony said.

BOE Acting Chair Karen Hirsh suggested that the BOE should add another meeting before its already scheduled Dec. 14 meeting, but members couldn’t agree on a time Thursday.

“The reality is that we got these guidelines yesterday,” Mercanti-Anthony said. “As a town, we have an incredibly protracted budget process.

Why we have to now rush and shortchange public comment in the next three weeks during the holiday season seems to me as problematic.

“Worst case scenario if we miss the budget deadline and the Board of Selectmen and the BET have to wait for us and we meet the first week in January, so be it,” Mercanti-Anthony said. “Are they going to arrest us?”

“One of the most important things we get to do is look at our budget and advocate for the things that we feel our schools and our students need,” said Hirsh. “And we got these budget guidelines later than I ever remember having seen them in the decade and a half I’ve been involved. These are big decisions.”