School board members and school administrators talk during a public meeting on Feb. 19.
ANSONIA – School budgets in Derby and Seymour are put together in similar ways.
Principals put together spending plans for their schools and send them to the central office.
The school district superintendent and the business manager write a budget, and then show it to the board of education – in public.
The school board meets – in public – and talks about how much money is needed to run the schools and then, usually early in the calendar year, vote – in public – to send a funding request to the town’s tax or finance boards.
It used to work like that in Ansonia – but not anymore.
The Ansonia process, according to interviews conducted by The Valley Indy, is less public, and, at least last year, the inverse of what is described above (and possibly questionable under state law, according to a 2024 report spelling out budget deadlines for school boards in Connecticut).
Last year the city issued the board of education a bottom line in April – which the school board accepted and approved in June, essentially sidelining the elected board of education’s role in the budget process.
So far this year, a formal budget request from the Ansonia Board of Education has not arrived – though Mayor David Cassetti has issued a budget summary earlier this month that calls for Ansonia schools to receive a 2.26 percent increase ($850,000), which would bring next year’s school budget to $38,426,212.
If the school board hasn’t voted on a budget, how did the mayor arrive at that number?
The school budget is now prepared by a small group behind closed doors, according to an interview last week with the mayor.
The people in the discussion include Mayor David Cassetti, Superintendent Joseph DiBacco, the school district business manager, budget consultant W. Kurt Miller, and Rich Bshara, the school board chairman who is also a long-time employee of the city’s finance office.
The school administrators tell the city officials what they need, according to the mayor.
“I talked to Superintendent DiBacco and Rich Bshara, who is the president of the board of ed, and all they did was verbally tell me that,” Cassetti said.
The mayor stressed the budget discussions are conversation only.
“I want to know how they came up with that money,” he added. “They told me verbally, $700,000 for (buses), $400,000 for special ed, or $600,000 for special ed, they verbally told me this,” Cassetti said. “So I told them I need something concrete to see what exactly it is.”
The Valley Indy requested the Ansonia school board’s budget twice, on Jan. 15 and Feb. 12.
Superintendent of Schools Joseph DiBacco acknowledged the first request, but said he couldn’t provide a budget because it was still being worked on.
Bshara acknowledged the Feb. 12 request, but did not provide a budget.
In Derby and Seymour, public discussions about school spending have already happened, with school boards already having voted on budgets. Those requests are under review by the Derby Board of Apportionment and Taxation and the Seymour Board of Finance.
John Marini, Ansonia’s corporation counsel, sent a message to The Valley Indy saying a school budget could be made available to the public this week.
However, Bshara, the school board chairman, said at a meeting Feb. 19 the budget could be made available in two to three weeks.
It’s not clear when the school board will actually vote on a school budget.
While school officials aren’t prepared to publicize a budget, they are willing to talk about the problems with their budget.
At the Feb. 19 meeting, Bshara and other board members talked for about 25 minutes about a lack of funding from the state, and said that the schools were struggling with mounting transportation and special education costs.
Bshara referred to the school’s budget as a “draft” in the meeting. That is the often used exemption to the state’s Freedom of Information Act that allows the government to keep“preliminary drafts or notes” private, as long as“the public interest in withholding documents outweighs public interest in disclosure.” Click here and here to learn more.
The same special education discussion happened in Derby in January and February, but the superintendent went over the problem with a draft budget on display for the public to follow along.
Boards of education are governed by state law.
“Under state law, a local BOE must take certain steps to prepare a proposed education budget for the upcoming year, including interacting with the town’s board of finance or other local appropriation-making body (e.g., board of selectmen or annual town meeting), as appropriate,” according to a 2024 report from the state’s Office of Legislative Research.
State law also imposes a deadline (though it should be noted state lawmakers often blow their own budget deadlines):
“Regarding school budgets, the law requires each local BOE to prepare an itemized cost estimate (i.e., “proposed budget”) for maintaining its public schools for the following year,” according to the report. At least two months before the annual meeting when appropriations are made, the BOE must submit the estimate to the board of finance, to the board of selectmen (if there is no board of finance), or otherwise to the authority making appropriations for the school district.”
The Ansonia Board of Education did not do that last year. It voted to adopt a budget in June, about two weeks after the Board of Aldermen had voted to adopt a citywide budget.
If Ansonia follows its charter and state law, the board of education must make an itemized budget available to the public by the end of this month.
Why They’re Doing This
The school superintendent’s office and the mayor’s office used to go to war over budgets every year.
Former Superintendent Carol Merlone regularly criticized Ansonia City Hall for not allocating enough money. The battle culminated in a 2018 lawsuit, in which the school district sued the city for using state grant money in place of local dollars, when the grant money was supposed to be used for school reform efforts.
That lawsuit was settled after the city agreed to pay $500,000.
The superintendent’s office and the mayor’s office are no longer at each other’s throats.
Bshara told The Valley Indy in 2024 that the closed-door process makes communication smoother between school and city officials and streamlines the budget formation process.
He denied that the board is hiding information from the public, saying that it submits its budget requests in a similar process to other city departments. State law doesn’t view the school board as just another city department. Its board is elected and is independent, but it cannot levy taxes.
By The Way …
In an interview with The Valley Indy, Cassetti talked about averting a budget crisis last year that almost cost teachers their jobs.
He said last year the board of education made a last-minute request for hundreds of thousands of dollars in its budget.
“I had to get them an additional $300,000 because Joe DiBacco had come to me at the eleventh hour before the budget and said, ‘I’m going to have to lay off twenty teachers and three or four AP classes,’” Cassetti said.
None of that was made public.
The public was told the mayor fully funded the school board’s budget request, even though the school board had accidentally uploaded a budget document to its website showing their initial ask was for more money.
School Board Chairman’s Response
The Valley Indy emailed this story to Bshara on Feb. 21 and requested a response. Bshara wrote back with the following statement:
“The Ansonia Board of Education is working diligently on the preparation of the FY26 school budget to present to our Board and then the City for review. We are working to make this budget as accurate and correct as possible, especially noting several large moving targets such as Special Ed costs and reimbursements, transportation costs, utility increases and fringe benefit costs.
It has been unfortunate that we have had 3 different business managers in as many years for varied reasons, (one passed away, one relocated and we just hired a replacement in December), and as such, we are behind schedule. It is my hope that we will have our budget request completed within the next several weeks to review with the BOE and then present to the city for review.”
The school board is next scheduled to meet March 12.
A public hearing on the mayor’s budget is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Feb. 24 in front of the Ansonia Board of Apportionment and Taxation. Click here to read the legal notice.
