Saying the district should prioritize the hiring of additional classroom teachers and hold off on funding varsity club sports until there’s a well-defined policy in place for doing so, the Board of Education on Monday proposed a 2015-16 operating budget that includes no money for the New Canaan High School Squash Team.
The $84,809,121 proposed operating budget is the major driver of the spending on the public schools, which in turn drives about two-thirds of all town spending. The school board said it’s deferring about $255,000 in spending on educators such as a part-time writing teacher at West School, student deans at the elementary schools and three general education teaching assistants.
For Board of Ed Secretary Dionna Carlson, while increased participation in extracurricular activities such as squash is a “wonderful” goal, “I think we need to prioritize where the dollars are, and I would probably say I would prefer to see that $20,000 spent on a writing specialist right now.”
“And I think maybe we are putting cart the before the horse, and maybe we should have a policy in place of how we can handle these extracurricular activities and then we fund them—instead of putting a pool there without a policy that we are reviewing as a board,” Carlson said at the meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School. “I think we have bigger things that we are not funding this year which are disappointing, I am sure, to many parents in the district. So that doesn’t minimize how important those activities are—I think they’re wonderful—it’s just there is not an unlimited pool of money and we re charged with the hard decisions of where do those dollars go.”
Ultimately, the school board voted 8-1 in favor of the operating budget—with a lone dissenting vote cast by Vice Chair Scott Gress.
He’s also one of three school board members, with Jennifer Richardson and Sheri West, who advocated at the meeting to restore $20,000 to the budget for the squash team.
That team had turned up en masse at a November Board of Ed meeting, urging the board to secure $20,000 to pay a coach lest the popular program dissolve.
Sports such as squash, skiing and rowing are not part of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, or CIAC, because not enough public high schools in the state have a team. That often relegates a sport to private funding only in New Canaan, because it means the district’s Athletic Department cannot offer funds, and the bylaws of the New Canaan High School All Sports Booster Club only allow disbursement of funds to CIAC sports, officials say.
West said at the meeting noted the squash team’s success over eight years, popularity among boys and girls, and the district’s own commitment to “educating the whole child.”
She urged the board to restore the funding, possibly through a student activity fund line item.
Gress said that, lip service aside, truly supporting teams such as ski club and squash would mean financial backing, not just emotional or honorific support.
“The Ski Club has come to us and asked us for money,” Gress said. “We have deferred them year after year on the same basis that they are not a CIAC-sanctioned sport. The squash club has come to us and we are supporting these clubs in every way except financially.”
He continued: “To expect that a kid continues to pay $1,500 or $2,000 a year to participate in a sport becomes really—even in a town like New Canaan—becomes really onerous. And I think we need to make a statement that says that we do care about healthy choices for the kids, we do care we are going to say that we care about the entire child, we need to put our money where our mouth is. And a $20,000 start is pretty small, but it would mean a lot to those clubs, and we could set up criteria by which they can come and apply for the money.”
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi at the meeting highlighted some line items included in the operating spending plan:
- Full funding of insurance liability;
- Out-of-district costs (gross total, not including an estimated $600,000 in anticipated reimbursements);
- Two additional teachers at Saxe (to serve the booming seventh-grade group);
- Two supervisory aides at Saxe;
- One custodian at Saxe;
- One additional teacher at the elementary level (looks like South, but not yet certain);
- .5 FTE district social worker (to accommodate “school climate” and state mandates).
The district will propose its spending plan to the Board of Selectmen at about 10 a.m. Wednesday, the first phase of approvals in the municipal budget process. The 4.87 percent figure is down somewhat from the operating budget presented initially by Luizzi. It includes approvals for capital spending, as well, anchored by a $10.1 million earmark for the Saxe Middle School auditorium renovation, with an attendant proposal to expand the school along its south side toward the front.