‘We Work Very Well Together To Provide a Leading School District’: Board of Finance Approves $185.2 Million Budget

The Board of Finance last week unanimously approved a $185.2 million budget for fiscal year 2027, a 2.3% rise over current spending. 

The proposed spending plan includes a Board of Education expense budget of $117.2 million, after public school administrators found $1.6 million in savings to its own proposed budget, including in healthcare claims, and stands to find even more savings as the Town Council works toward a finalized spending plan for next fiscal year, according to finance board Chair Todd Lavieri. [Detailed budget documents, including the full Board of Finance recommendation, can be found here.]

After the Board of Finance proposed a $2 million reduction to the Board of Education’s spending plan for next fiscal year—a directive that galvanized members of the school board and general public (see below)—Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi identified $800,000 in savings through out-of-district placements, “turnover savings” and food service-related healthcare costs, Lavieri said during a regular meeting Thursday, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.

“Now, speaking of better data, as we get into the claims, as they come in, there’s an improvement in the claims and a reduction of another $300,000,” Lavieri said during introductory comments at the meeting. “Again, better data today or this week, or this last couple of weeks than was able to be forecasted back in December. So that’s $800,000 plus $300,000.”

Another $500,000 was found through the “internal services fund” in “money available for healthcare,” he said.

“There’s a whole formula for how it gets created, and there’s a certain amount that the town has and the Board of Ed has and so forth,” Lavieri said. “That fund has a projected surplus above the required amount or the amount we agree on as a town, of about $2.1 million. Call it $2 million is projected to be overfunded. And so today, the thinking is now that we have the January and February actuals, the healthcare expenses are coming in favorably, that we can reduce that surplus by about $500,000, which is another savings. So now that takes all those three things—$800,000, $300,000, $500,000—$1.6 million of operating expenses. I will add that there is still a surplus.”

Lavieri stressed that no one knows what will happen with March claims as the Board of Finance-approved budget moves to the Town Council, but “there’s an opportunity to possibly even take a little bit more of that surplus.”

“That’s going to bring some additional savings,” Lavieri said. “So we’re not saying there’ll be more above the $1.6 million that we’ve got today, but that’s a possibility for the Town Council and the Board of Ed and superintendent to look at in late March, early April. So that’s where we are on that. So that’s $1.6 million without any other expenses that were being discussed by others, not by us, but people were talking about teachers and things and so forth. So obviously none of that’s on the table. Never was, frankly.”

The observations appeared to put to bed concerns about the proposed $2 million reduction to the BOE spending request that had circulated online and were voiced by some earlier in the week (and during a portion of Thursday’s meeting) in public comments to the finance board.

During the Tuesday’s, March 3 Board of Finance meeting, Lavieri opened by appearing to address some of those voices, and perhaps a March 1 opinion piece signed by all Board of Ed members. In it, the BOE said that a $2 million reduction to their spending request “would mean an elimination of faculty and staff at NCPS [New Canaan Public Schools].”

Noting that the BOE budget represents about two-thirds of the total budget, Lavieri said that it’s “vitally important that we, the Board of Finance and the administration—the superintendent, Board of Ed—work together and truly understand the schools’ needs.”

“As I’m sure everybody knows, but maybe you don’t, this Board has diligently spent two decades building a leading school district with this administration, we are not passive participants,” he said in his March 3 opening remarks. “We have the dual responsibility, though, of maintaining a leading school district that we’ve worked very hard to build while also providing financial guardrails and guidance for the taxpayers. Expanding on that, across the town, we work with everyone in town to build and maintain this great town—the roads, the facilities, the fields, safety, the parks, our downtown—while trying to keep the cost of doing so fully transparent and as reasonable as possible. As we’ve learned over the years, or I should say, as I’ve learned over the years, there are seven key ingredients to a successful school district: a strong and committed school administration, great teachers, motivated students, engaged parents, wonderful facilities, money, and an ‘X factor’ that includes tutoring, backup, substitutes, and town support. And we have it all. We have it all. We’re so fortunate. My three sons benefited from the excellent school district that we have, and it only gets better. This context is important for people in town to be reminded of. We’re very proud of what we have collectively built and supported over the years, and expect to maintain this high level of excellence for many years to come. We’ve thoughtfully built a top school district, not only in the state of Connecticut, but in the country. We aren’t going to do something to compromise the greatness that we all built together, believe me.”

Lavieri said that the budget isn’t about “Republicans or Democrats, old versus young, new versus longtime residents.”

“Those aren’t the things this Board focuses on,” he said. “This is an excellent nonpartisan board that represents everyone all the time. For starters, regarding the school budget, this Board hasn’t cut anything from the Board of Education’s budget, and nothing we’re doing here or have done in the past few weeks is unprecedented. Every year, we ask the administration to reduce 1 to 2% of the budget request, and every year they have. In fact, over the past five years, we’ve asked for about $5 million to $6 million, and we’ve gotten back that much or more. [Note: Lavieri said later that the total for the five-year period was $8.8 million.] We work very well together to provide a leading school district.”

Yet there are two differences this year, Lavieri said. First, because the base amount is higher, the dollar amount is commensurately higher. And second, he said, “this year we’ve discovered an ‘accounting of headcount’ discrepancy.”

“Nothing unethical or fraudulent, in our opinion, and contrary to comments that have been made,” Lavieri said. “Just a transparency and process problem that has now been addressed. We can debate each year 1 to 2%, which is nothing, but we would never question the integrity of the superintendent or the Board of Ed. What we discovered, however, put a bright light on an issue with a ‘lump sum.’ What you may or may not know—and I know many of you don’t know this—the Board of Finance provides a lump sum of your money to the Board of Ed. Each year after our reviews, we take a lump sum amount and assign it to the school administration and the Board of Ed. In 2025, we assigned $118 million of your money to the Board of Ed and the school administration, and we had a top district. In ‘26, this year, which ends in June, we signed $120 million. This year, they’ve asked for $4.5 million more for a total request of $124.5 million. We have proposed cutting their budget from last year’s level. We do support adding $2 million more. So to net it out, we asked for a 1.6% or $2 million decrease from the requested $4 million increase, right in the middle of the 1 to 2% range. Remember, during this period, the number of students has decreased. It’s important to remind people, the Board of Finance does not determine, by law, where and how the lump sum is spent or where the funds are directed. We don’t choose to fund things or un-fund things. That’s not how this works. If programs are added, if programs are cut, the administration does that, not this Board. How it’s spent, what is added, what is cut, is up to the Board of Education and the superintendent. Someone mentioned that we, the Board of Finance, were cutting teachers. No one has ever said that. I don’t think the superintendent has ever said that that I’m aware of. We never said it because everyone who’s involved knows we have no ability to cut people or anything specific, any specific program or item. It is disappointing this is the kind of information that gets spread so widely, but it’s the world we live in. This Board focuses on the facts.”

Regarding the lump sum, Lavieri said, it must “accommodate variability” and “it’s given with full trust and, we assume, full transparency.”

“As I said a minute ago, what is different this year is that we did uncover a process problem regarding headcount,” he said. “So let’s spend a minute on that. In the fiscal year that ended in June, 2021, we had 752 staff and 4,176 students in the K-12 enrollment. This budget, we have our request for 803 staff, for 3,953 students — 51 more staff for 223 fewer students. We went back and looked and confirmed that we approved six budgets that requested 21 more staff. Each budget specifically had staff amounts outlined by department for what was being requested during the budget process, down to the half- and even the quarter-FTE. Very detailed. The problem is that we added 51, not 21, that added an estimated $2.5 million in salary cost to this budget alone, and over $10 million of taxpayer money over that period, with additional healthcare costs as well. Those weren’t things we explicitly voted on or approved or were aware of.”

The finance board was “shocked” by the discovery, he said.

“We don’t think the Board of Ed explicitly approved them either, because they weren’t in the numbers that didn’t show the delta, and we don’t know why an audit wouldn’t have picked up on the fact that there was a discrepancy between what we had approved, what was actual at the end of the year and compared that with the approval,” Lavieri said. “This is the challenge when giving a lump sum.”

He noted that New Canaan gets little state funding and said, “When we find out that the expense doesn’t square with the request, we hit pause to better understand.”

“That’s our job,” Lavieri continued at the March 3 meeting. “The Board of Ed lump sum over the recent years provided enough money to hire 30 people more than had been asked for. People brought this up to me and I have to share it because people made these comments. If [Public Works Director] Tiger [Mann] had budgeted for two dump trucks and brought three, there’d be a problem. If the police chief budgeted for two extra officers and added five, there’d be a big problem. So what we’ve been trying to really understand is somehow there must have been enough room for some optimization or some better transparency of need. That’s what that told us. Either the lump sum was bigger than was needed, or the number of staff needed wasn’t known or transparent to us and the taxpayers. The process for tracking actual-to-actual and budget-to-actual was in need of repair. The reason for all of this is to help everyone understand why we spent so much time on the Board of Ed budget this year. Having said that, we will have a title reporting process going forward, tracking the headcount changes going forward, and we’re asking for the superintendent to still find a few more percentage points, which I know he’s looking for, and I know we’ll continue to work on.”

Following Lavieri’s opening comments on March 3, several residents called for the appointed body to approve the school board’s (originally $118.2 million) spending request for next fiscal year. Those advocating for the full request said the BOE’s proposed budget is already lean and financially responsible, compares favorably on a cost-per-student basis with similar nearby districts, reflects additional reductions to the proposed operating ($800,000 down from the original request) and capital budgets, and is driven by contractually obligated salary increases. The reduction of $2 million to the BOE proposed budget appears to be arbitrary and unprecedented in scale, they said, will directly affect Special Education staff and programs and negatively affect the public schools generally.

One commenter, Erica Schwedel, who serves as secretary of the Board of Education, said she “struggled to understand” how Lavieri’s five-year look-back provided “a compelling basis for an extraordinary $2 million operating cut.”

“And it does not match my experience as a five-year member of the Board of Education,” Schwedel said. “I have participated in countless hours of detailed budget meetings and workshops every one of the last five years, and I know that the dollars we spent have been analyzed and scrutinized to ensure that they were required to deliver a top-notch education to our students without overspending. As Dr. Luizzi said in the past, these are not just dollars spent—these are strategic investments that we’re making in our children. I strongly disagree with the idea that because of past support, we can somehow pull back, or that we can take our foot off the gas for a year when it comes to providing our students with a first-class education. As you and people in our community know, if we are not adapting and moving forward, we are going to fall behind. This is not what our community wants and not why people come to New Canaan.”

Referring to the finance board’s call for a $2 million reduction to the BOE’s spending request, Schwedel said there had been no “adequate explanation of why the cuts are this steep this year.”

“You’ve also shared that you want to strengthen communication between the Board of Education and the Board of Finance, and I’m supportive of that,” she said. “I think if you want the data presented differently, we should do that and let’s work on it together. I do ask, though, that you don’t cut the Board of Ed’s budget in order to get information presented in a way that you would like it to be presented in. So in summary, I urge you to consider the cuts on the table and not make any further cuts beyond the $1.8 million in capital and the $800,000 in operating that we’ve already discussed.”

Another commenter, Board of Ed member Brendan Hayes, said he found it “tough to listen to the intro comments where there’s commentary about not controlling headcount, and then there’s a discussion about headcount.”

He continued: “And a discussion about money we spend over five years instead of talking about the costs that we’ve controlled over the last 10, 20 years, and having our increases less than inflation and reducing our per-pupil spending, going down more toward the middle than where we were 10, 20 years ago. So I just think, in this conversation, we should be upfront about the actual impacts of dollars that are reduced from our requested budget. If this $2 million amount goes through, there are going to be meaningful headcount impacts to our budget. Yes, those are decisions that the Board of Ed makes in consultation with the administration, but those are impacts. And so when the Board of Finance makes a call to reduce the budget by $1 million dollars, $1.2 million, $2 million, you know that there are going to be headcount impacts.”

Though the Board of Ed must ultimately decide how the town-approved funds are used, “the Board of Finance should understand that when you cut that money, you are actually reducing the number of people who are working within our schools, who can serve our students, and frankly, we need those people,” Hayes said.

He added: “In some cases, as we’ve talked about over many years, many of the increased head count reduces costs. It doesn’t result in increased cost because it means that we can do lots of different things here, like maintenance, like better Special Ed, so we don’t have to place students in other districts. So I just wanted to lay that all out. It’s not like you can say, ‘I’m going to cut $2 million and there’s going to be no impact, because we, the Board of Finance, don’t have to make that decision.’ ”

During the March 5 meeting, Lavieri said during his opening remarks that “there’s a lot of misinformation, I would say, that was floating around that I did try to address [two days prior].”

In addition to Lavieri, Board of Finance members voting in favor of the budget were Secretary Chris Le Bris, Michael Chen, Maria Weingarten, Bob Hamill, James Yao, Nick Mitrakis, Jan Schaefer, Steve Doka and Alan Badanes.

The Board of Finance budget recommendation now goes to the Town Council, and the legislative body may accept, reduce, or reject it. According to a press release issued Friday by the town, the Town Council plans to hold a public hearing on the budget April 2, and is scheduled to approve a final budget April 14.

Lavieri thanked all departments at finance board’s final budget meeting.

In the town’s press release, Lavieri said, “Working collaboratively with each department, we again met our primary financial goals we established at the beginning of our budget review. We reduced the amount raised by taxation by $3.0 million, we cut the capital expense by $4.0 million, and we reduced the taxpayer supported capital (not bonded), by $1.2 million. That helped us push the town-wide expense increase down to 2.3%. The amount raised by taxation is currently projected to increase 3.4% to cover increased expenses and a decrease in non-taxation revenues. The Board of Education expense increased 3% year over year. Town operating expenses excluding the Board of Education are up 1.2%. Non-property tax revenues are budgeted to decrease by 10%, or approximately $1 million. Currently the mill rate is budgeted to increase 2.6% to 17.12. The final mill rate will be set in June once the Board of Finance receives the budget back from the Town Council.”

Lavieri noted in the press release that many departments came in this year “with increases below our guidelines.”

“As we have discussed over the past few years, our town financials remain in very good shape,” he said in the release. “Our top priority continues to be maintaining the top school district in the state of Connecticut that we have built. A high-quality, high-performing school district has been a focus for this town for many years. The entire school budget represents 67% of our total budget. Our pensions remain funded, reflecting the responsibility we have to ensure that our commitments are met, and that the ‘can is not kicked’ down the road penalizing current and future residents and taxpayers.  We have a AAA rating by Moody’s. In summary we strive as a board and as a town to deliver value and results for every dollar we collect and manage.”