Gift cards, trips at issue in school budget dispute
NORWALK — Gift cards distributed with no accounting. Trips across the country to recruit teachers without a price tag.
These are two in a litany of complaints lodged by the city’s Chief Financial Officer Henry Dachowitz in a pair of presentations last week, and in a subsequent conversation with Hearst Connecticut Media. The presentations painted a dire picture of Norwalk Public Schools’ finances.
To hear Dachowitz tell it, in addition to budgeting deceptively, the district had fully omitted some of its expenses, including gift cards given out as a form of teacher appreciation and recruitment trips to places like Michigan, Las Vegas and Puerto Rico. Once confronted, Dachowitz said, school officials refused to share or provided limited details.
Dachowitz said the gift cards came to his attention when a school employee attempted to use several of them to pay her taxes roughly six months ago. The tax assessor alerted Dachowitz,
who said he unsuccessfully sought additional information from the schools.
“At a conceptual level, OK, maybe this is a very effective tool, not just cards but recruiting trips,” Dachowitz said. “But what was the cost of the trip? Who went and for how long? What were the costs? What were the benefits? Did we recruit people as a result? I’m just looking for a cost-benefit analysis. I know I haven’t seen any documentation.”
Dachowitz has raised the con
cerns after the Board of Education requested a $216 million budget — a 7 percent increase from this year that will require the city’s help to bridge the gap.
The school district disputes both Dachowitz’s overall assessment of its budget — an impassioned
counter to which was delivered Wednesday by schools CFO Thomas Hamilton — and on the issues of gift cards and teacher recruitment trips.
“I have no idea why he is saying he was denied information,” Norwalk Public Schools Chief Communications Officer Brenda Wilcox-Williams said Friday. “When an issue was reported involving $100 in gift cards, the
district investigated, and both (Chief Talent Officer) Javier Padilla and Tom Hamilton promptly replied to questions from Mr. Dachowitz and also readily shared tracking logs and other information with him. Just like the city has in the past when much larger financial issues have been identified, the district also followed up by reviewing procedures to identify any gaps and reinforce controls.”
Williams offered descriptions of multiple trips and offered information on the gift cards, which she said were ordered in fiscal year 2017-18 by an employee who is no longer with the district.
She said school staff traveled to Las Vegas for a national human resources convention and to Michigan for a national education recruitment event.
“Virtually every state was represented, with districts as far away as Alaska recruiting for hardto-fill roles,” Williams said. “Norwalk’s primary focus was to look for science and STEM teachers, as Connecticut’s high school science requirement had just been expanded, making it challenging to find teachers closer to home.”
Williams did not answer whether teachers had been recruited as a result of the Michigan event. She also did not provide who attended, how long they stayed, or what either of
the trips cost the district.
The gift cards were ordered at an expense of roughly $80,000, Williams said. At last week’s Board of Estimate and Taxation meeting, Mayor Harry Rilling said he’d heard the district spent anywhere between $30,000 and $300,000 on the cards.
They were used “as small tokens of appreciation for teachers and school volunteers, and also as student awards and for use at recruitment fairs,” Williams said.
According to Dachowitz, the gift cards were worth $10 and cost the district $15 each to make.
Dachowitz said after learning about the gift cards, he inquired about the status of any remaining inventory. He was allegedly told at the time that the remaining cards were securely stored. Williams said Friday that there is no remaining inventory and no plans to order more.
The bigger picture
The cards and trips are just two apparent issues highlighted by Dachowitz. But the diverging accounts by the city and the schools is indicative of the larger rift that’s opened in the last week over budgeting. Relatively early in the budget process, each CFO has presented his own, unique interpretation of the same document.
Dachowitz, who is in his first budget season after
joining the city in 2019, has sought to lengthen the process into the fall to allow more time for dialogue. In that time, he met individually with every department head and went line-by-line over their respective budget. Most, he said, were receptive to his analysis.
According to state law, cities don’t have line-item authority over Board of Education budgets. But they are tasked with capping the budget based on school priorities and initiatives. The process requires partnership, but has instead created frustration, according to Dachowitz, which has boiled over into the public sphere.
Dachowitz referred to the schools’ budgeting as “sneaky and deceptive.” Hamilton, in response, called Dachowitz “adversarial” and “inaccurate.”
After Dachowitz’s budget presentation last Monday, Superintendent of Schools Steven J. Adamowski said it lacked accuracy and professionalism and reflected the “national diminution of civility and respect in public discourse.”
At a Wednesday meeting of the Board of Education Finance Committee, several members expressed concern at the tone the negotiations had taken. Rilling, for his part, attempted to sidestep the spat.
“This administration is committed to transparency
and the numbers are what they are,” Rilling wrote in a Thursday statement. “We are going to do our jobs and put together a budget that is fair to all sides. We are not going to continue to debate this through the press and play games — we have to move forward.”
On Tuesday, Dachowitz said he has had good interactions with Hamilton, who has served Norwalk for more than 20 years, including a stint as the city’s CFO. But he has been critical of Hamilton and Adamowski, claiming they’ve obscured aspects of the budget and, most recently, delayed getting revised drafts of the budget to the city. The result was a full weekend of work in City Hall for him, Rilling and other city officials in preparation for the Feb. 10 presentation to the Board of Estimate and Taxation.
The complaints are not personal, Dachowitz said. It merely comes down to the math.
“We’ve been accommodating, we’ve been cooperative,” Dachowitz said. “I focus on the numbers. I don’t think I was uncivil. I think sometimes people can disagree. And I think they don’t like the fact that I disagree with them. But I always try to be civil. It’s not personal. I think we both have a goal of doing what’s best for the city.”