By Brandon T. Bisceglia
Milford’s superintendent of schools has warned that the closure of one of the city’s schools is a strong possibility to cover a reduced allocation recommended by the Board of Finance.
The Board of Education had proposed a $106.48 million 2023-2024 budget in January – a 4.39 percent over current spending. In March, however, the Board of Finance lowered that increase to $2.61 million, or 2.58 percent.
The reduction, if adopted by the Board of Aldermen, would leave the BOE with a $1.8 million gap to fill – and school officials say their options for doing so are limited.
At a special budget workshop meeting of the Board of Education on March 29, Superintendent Dr. Anna Cutaia explained that there was no getting around significant cuts if the lower amount is approved.
“Three point four percent of the 4.392 represents $3.5 million in increases in salaries and benefits,” she explained “That is a very important key to our conversation this evening and moving forward, because the 2.58 percent that was given to us above this year’s budget doesn’t even cover our contractual obligations in salaries.”
Cutaia added that fact alone meant that the Board of Education would be forced to make cuts in other areas, as well as cutting into the current workforce.
During her presentation, Cutaia argued that education is a human capital-driven system, so that maintaining and adding programs usually requires adding staff. Moreover, she said, yearly contractual wage increases for the next few years are expected to increase by an average around 2.7 percent – again above the amount approved by the Board of Finance.
“Even for the next three years, we’ll be unable to meet our contractual obligations, which will mean reductions in not just staffing, but likely programming and services for our children,” she said.
According to Cutaia, closing an unspecified elementary school could save the district about $1.2 million for the year, and closing a middle school could produce $1.7 million in savings. Any such move would also likely increase class sizes and require layoffs.
Closing a school is not the only option on the table. In order to meet the $1.8 million threshold, Cutaia offered a laundry list of cuts to programs and services, including deferring the normal replacement of servers and computers, abandoning the update to the middle school mathematics program that is already underway, increasing class sizes, dropping elementary world languages and eliminating freshman sports.
Board of Education member Cindy Wolfe Boynton suggested during the meeting that the elimination of several science, technology, engineering and math programs at the same time would leave students little access to that type of experiential learning.
“It sounds like that with the elimination of all of these hands-on learning, that our students are going to have very little opportunity for that problem-based, problem-solving learning that we were seeing so much success with,” she said.
“If we’re not closing a school, then we’re dipping from a lot of buckets, and some of those buckets may be redundant in category” Cutaia replied. “The STEM work we’ve done for five years will take a huge hit. We’re going to unravel STEM at the elementary.”
For its part, the Board of Finance in its 4-1 decision against the Board of Education’s requested budget suggested that the system had too many administrators and counselors. The finance board also discussed declining enrollment in its decision – a topic that has been brought up in past budget negotiations. Milford school enrollment, like most schools across Connecticut, has been slowly dropping over the last few decades due to demographic changes in the state.
The Board of Aldermen now has the final say over how much the Board of Education receives as it reviews and finalizes the entire city budget. The Milford Ed Advocates, an organization of community members dedicated to supporting the city’s schools, planned as of press time to rally in front of City Hall and push the aldermen to restore the funding for education.