The good news for the Ansonia school system’s budget outlook for next year?
School officials expect a state grant that pays for over half the district’s budget to increase nearly $443,000.
That’s pretty much the only good news.
School officials met for the first time with members of the newly-elected Board of Aldermen Jan. 15 to review their budget proposal for next year.
For more than two hours, principals and other administrators told the Aldermen’s finance committee about the litany of challenges facing the school system, which they said needs $1.9 million, or 6.71 percent, increase in funding for 2014 – 2015 just to avert layoffs.
This is the first school budget to be presented under new Mayor David Cassetti’s watch.
He helped unseat incumbent Mayor James Della Volpe in November with help from Ansonia taxpayers angry at last year’s tax increase which was driven, to some degree, by education spending.
School officials seemed aware of that fact Wednesday, urging Aldermen who now make up the board’s Republican majority to find a way to support their funding request.
“We know you have a difficult job ahead of you, but if there is anything you can do to support our children, we’d appreciate it,” Superintendent Carol Merlone said.
The schools’ proposed budget for 2014 – 2015 totals $29,879,549. This year’s budget is $28,000,000.
Even so, Ansonia taxpayers pay directly for less than half the district’s costs.
The city levied $34,624,554 in taxes this year, according to the budget on its website.
The school district’s budget was $28 million — with more than $15 million of that tab picked up by the state’s Educational Cost Sharing grant.
But at the same time, the city’s school system has lost more than $2 million in other grants in the past five years, due to funding drying up or the schools improving.
For example, in 2010 – 2011, the city received $1,170,738 under the state’s Priority School District program, which targeted low-performing schools.
By 2013 – 2014, that number dwindled to $480,184.
Next year it will be zero — and the schools are asking city taxpayers to make up the difference.
Principals Plead
Some of the Priority School District money was used to fund the high school’s PACE program, which diverts students who would otherwise drop out with more individualized instruction.
High school Principal Joseph Dobbins told Aldermen the loss of the program, which has 37 students enrolled in it, would be “devastating.”
“These are students who when they were in high school were just not making it, and truthfully they were burning up our resources within the school,” Dobbins said.
Dobbins and other principals also gave Aldermen overviews of their “operating budgets” — essentially the little discretionary funding they have, not including salaries and benefits for staff, which make up about 70 percent of the district’s overall budget.
Example — Mead School Principal Terri Goldson has an operating budget of $52,156 for a school with 590 kids.
That’s about $88.40 per student per year in a school where about 75 percent of children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty.
“Poverty impacts education,” Goldson told the Aldermen. “We have to work much harder to bring our students up to snuff. And that’s all students.”
Article continues after the school district’s budget proposal, posted below.
Budget Packet to Aldermen 1 – 15-14
The money they receive for things like supplies goes quickly if principals aren’t careful, he pointed out, rattling off a dizzying list of expenses he encounters.
A set of “Little Level Reader” books — $400 per classroom. A chair — $30. Desks? $50 apiece. An easel with a whiteboard — $150.
He said the school uses a dozen pallets of copy paper every year at about $1,000 a pop because teachers are creating workbooks by hand for students since the district can’t afford to buy them.
And they can’t rely on students’ parents to help much.
“With 75 percent of our students in poverty, if we don’t supply it, they don’t have it,” Prendergast School Principal Joseph Apicella said.
Special Education
Special education costs also add up because of support services needed to assist students with identified special education needs.
In addition, if the child needs to be placed at a school outside the district, the home school district has to pick up the costs, including tuition and transportation, per state and federal laws.
Kathie Gabrielson, who supervises the schools’ special education programs, said children identified with special needs make up about 12 percent of the city’s student population — and providing services to them makes up about 25 percent of the budget.
The schools do what they can to minimize those costs, she said.
For example, Ansonia has 46 students identified as having autism, she said.
Two-thirds are taught in-district.
Those that go to a regional school for students with autism cost the district $111,000 apiece in tuition alone, she said, not even including transportation.
“We have worked very hard to develop good solid autism programming in district so we can keep those costs down as much as possible,” she said.
And more and more students with special needs are enrolling in the city’s schools — since Oct. 1, about 30 have moved in to the city, she said.
“We’ve had a few students move out, but nowhere near enough to balance who’s moving in,” Gabrielson said.
“There Is Nothing New’
James Gaskins, the schools’ business administrator, tried to show Aldermen that the $1.9 million requested by the school board was not exorbitant.
He pointed out the slight increase in state funding — and the roughly $4.5 million the district will receive in other grants.
He said school principals were told for the third year in a row they’d have no new dollars to run their buildings, and noted that, on average, over the past five years the school budget has increased 1.83 percent annually.
The spending plan includes no new personnel or programs, he stressed.
“There is nothing new in this budget,” Gaskins said.
And though the district’s line item for teacher and administrator salaries alone needs an additional $1,039,573 to maintain level funding next year — a year-over-year increase of 9.56 percent — he said that figure doesn’t mean teachers will be getting 9 percent pay hikes.
Included in the number is the nearly $500,000 in Priority School District funding Ansonia received last year but will not receive this year.
Gaskins said salaries are also jumping this year because of the success of early retirement the school district used to save money in recent years.
The school district saved money in the short-term by hiring rookie teachers to replace higher-paid teachers who retired.But as those new teachers accumulate experience, their pay increases at a higher rate.
“We have a step program based on years of service and degree of education,” he said. “The teachers who have retired were always at the top step, so they only got a general wage increase.”
On top of those increases, 2 to 2.5 percent, teachers who move up a step see about a 7 percent increase in pay.
And even so, they’re still paid roughly $8,000 less on average than they would be even in neighboring Derby.
That makes keeping good teachers difficult.
“Teachers stay here because they want to be here, they like to be here,” Goldson, the Mead School principal, said, noting he lost a special education teacher from his school who took a job in Norwalk that paid $15,000 more. “But there’s a point in time, they have families, they start looking around, they have to make a decision between liking and wanting to be here and paying the bills for their growing families.”
“We’re doing a great job for the money that we have,” Gaskins said, saying only three school districts in Connecticut spend less per student.
The Aldermen’s finance committee has until Feb. 3 to finalize a city-wide spending plan for 2014 – 2015 to be considered by the full board at its Feb. 11 meeting.
