The Anxious Generation, Part I: The Problem

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“Young people today are different.” Yes, it seems every older generation always says that. We also like to say, “when I was a kid, we walked to school, carried our lunch, were always outside…” While all of this may be a cliché, the harsh reality is that we are experiencing a dramatic increase in social, emotional, and mental health issues, as well as substance abuse and suicide, compared to previous generations. Should we be concerned about this? What has caused it? Is there anything we can really do about it? 

Jonathan Haidt, in his recent book The Anxious Generation, addresses many of the questions mentioned above. Members our Southington school system read his book a year ago, and it warrants a public airing. I have already discussed the issues raised in Haidt’s book at our Southington public library class on January 17.

Haidt points out that around 2009 some dramatic changes started appearing in young people, changes that can be tied to internet technology: cell phones, social media, and video games. I was still teaching at SHS then, and I saw changes in how students interacted with each other and with me – as well as an increase in suicide attempts, substance abuse, and mental health challenges. Haidt also cites evidence for physical changes in the developing brains of young people as a result of these technologies.

Technological progress makes our lives easier, enhances communication and connection in the world, and vastly increases the availability of information. Yet it also produces negative impacts. Tech companies study how to deliver quick rewards to young people, dopamine hits that keep them hooked. Many for-profit companies intentionally seek to hook young people, thus altering brain and cognitive development, and increasing rates of anti-social behavior.

While many parents were thrilled to find that smartphones or tablets could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours, few understood the mental health, developmental and socialization damage that was being done. The frontal cortex of our brains, essential for self-control, delaying gratification and resisting temptation, is not fully developed until the mid-20s, and preteens are particularly vulnerable. Gen Z became the first generation ever to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and often unsuitable for children and adolescents. 

The average young person today spends five hours a day on the internet. COVID isolation did not help, either. No wonder that student self-reports of feeling isolated or lonely have escalated.

When studies started to show this, many parents and adults went into defensive denial. Few realized that the developing brains of impressionable young people were being rewired. Social media inflicted damage on girls, while video games, porn, and gambling damaged boys. In-person physical play and socialization were replaced by addictive internet content.

In addition to the Great Rewiring of Childhood, as Haidt describes it, parents have also became overprotective of their children, restricting their autonomy in the real world. Fears of kidnappers and sex offenders reduced free, unsupervised outdoor play. As a phone-based childhood replaced a play-based childhood, more young people prefer to stay indoors and play online. There some wandered into adult internet content with little adult supervision. Some even looked for emotional support in AI or online, with some shockingly negative consequences. The indoors is not much safer than the outdoors.

Haidt describes a grim situation. A law passed in 1998 called COPPA was supposed to protect children by requiring consent, and 13 became the “internet age” as a result, but it is easy to bypass this barrier.

Still, Haidt also suggests some other specific actions we as a society can do to counter this. I will talk about some of these ideas in my next column.

Security and Usability Are Goals for Town’s New Website

Southington's Director of IT Mitchell Gugliotti shows off the Town's new website. PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

Southington’s new head of IT, Mitchell Gugliotti, joined Town Hall last January after a stint at the State DOT, where he was responsible for various digital data projects. Now as the Director of Informational Technology and Geographic Information Systems, he heads an office that is responsible for building and maintaining the Town’s main website.

As soon as he arrived, he began to hear complaints about the site – lots of complaints, from Town staff, elected officials, and other users.

So Gugliotti set out to do something about that. Taking advantage of the fact that the Town had to switch to a new domain to stay compliant with State regulations, he worked with his staff to do a complete overhaul of its layout and design.

Now, one year later, the Town has a new website – https://www.southingtonct.gov/ - which he hopes will offer an improved user experience, among other things.

Protecting against Scams

There were two main reasons for the upgrade, according to Gugliotti. First, the State of Connecticut mandated that the web addresses for all government agencies, including towns, must belong to the .gov domain by July 1, 2026. That means they must have .gov at the end of their urls.

This change is not cosmetic, but designed to enhance security by protecting users from scams and fraud. Acquiring a .gov domain is difficult; an individual must jump through a series of hoops to be approved for one, such as proving they represent a government entity and submitting a passport scan. By contrast, acquiring a .org domain is fairly easy. Scammers sometimes create mimic websites and lure people to them with addresses that look official – townofsouthingtonofficial.org, for example. The .gov tag thus serves as a token of authenticity.

“If people think they are interacting with a government website, they can now keep it in the back of their heads – if it’s not .gov, don’t trust it,” Gugliotti said.

Improving the User Experience

Beyond enhanced security, the new website’s design is intended to address the host of user complaints.

“When I came here, all the reports I got were that it’s hard to navigate the site. People said, I can’t find anything I’m looking for; things are buried; I’m trying to pay a bill and it takes a million clicks to get there. Residents, Town Council members, the Town Manager, they all reported the same thing.”

“For me, that was a red flag that something needed to be changed. Especially because, in this day and age, people want to interact with the Town online, since it’s convenient. It also makes the Town’s job easier when things are online because there are other automations we can put in on the back end that make things run more efficiently.”

“We were making the switch from .org to .gov, and we were working on moving our email to a cloud service. So this seemed like a good time to combine jobs.”

The task turned out to be larger than he had expected. “I actually underestimated the website at first,” Gugliotti admitted. “I didn’t realize it was so complex, I thought it would be a lot more focused. As I went through the process, I started to really see the spiderweb that was underneath the hood, that had accumulated over the years.”

Ideas for the new layout and organization came from many different sources. “My core testers are people from all different walks of life – people here in town, different department heads. I also had a group of people who are currently in charge of maintaining the website, and they had great ideas as well.”

He even consulted with his family: “Full disclosure: I use my parents a lot as test subjects. They love it and they hate it sometimes. The more the better. I’m always open to more feedback.”

Gugliotti and his staff did most of the work themselves. “All of the domain work we did in-house. The email migration we did in-house. The redesign was a hybrid approach where we had control of the design but farmed it out.” A web developer was paid a few thousand dollars to assist with the graphic design. “We worked on it for about six months.”

As for the success of the final product, readers can judge for themselves by trying out the site, which is now live. One frequently-used function, ‘Pay Bills Online’ now sits front and center on the homepage; a user can reach most payment pages in about two clicks.

SCREENSHOT OF HOMEPAGE

“The number one thing I wanted to focus on was getting where you want to go with the least amount of clicks as possible,” Gugliotti said.

The site also has a cleaner design than the old one, with boldface headers, bullet-pointed text, and a color-scheme based on SHS Blue Knights’ blue.

Now that the new site is up and running, the IT office will monitor how well it functions, gather feedback, and determine which parts, if any, require tweaking. After that, Mitchell plans to revamp the procedures departments must use to submit requests for updates. He would also like to begin a conversation with departments like the Library and Calendar House, which maintain their own sites, to help them with upgrades and make all the town’s sites work together smoothly.

“We haven’t gotten there yet," he noted. "Those are the next steps."

Schools Budget Gets Close Scrutiny at Workshops

The budget journey: the various steps required to create a new budget for the school system. SUPERINTENDENT STEVE MADANCY SLIDE

On January 13 and 15, the Board of Education held a pair of workshops at the John Weichsel Municipal Center where board members and school system administrators went through the proposed Fiscal Year 26/27 school budget with a figurative fine-toothed comb – and wrestled with a host of thorny problems, from bus scheduling to student/teacher ratios.

In the days leading up to the sessions, Board members read through the budget document submitted by Superintendent Steve Madancy and developed questions, 40 in total, about the goods and services it covered and their associated costs. After receiving these questions (which can be read here), Madancy worked with fellow administrators and school staff to sketch out replies and track down any requested specifics. This advance work made it possible to hold a discussion in which the basic issues were already reasonably clear, thus allowing for a more substantial dialogue.

While the atmosphere at both workshops was consistently civil, the stakes were also high. The total budget ask, $130,299,074, represents a 6.89% increase over the previous year. Most of this increase would have to be covered by local tax-payers – more than ever, in fact, since state and federal funding has remained flat while costs go up. Because education spending represents about three-fourths of the town’s overall budget, it is hard to see how a noticeable hike in local tax rates could be avoided if the proposed budget is adopted.

These considerations seemed to be on the mind of everyone in the room, given the frequency with which the Superintendent was asked, in effect: Can we achieve the same result with less expense? Are there any goods and services we can forgo? Madancy himself pointed to 17 department requests which he had either rejected, trimmed or found other means of funding in his budget.

At the same time, the school system has a crucial set of tasks to perform in order to educate the town’s children. Therefore, the participants also asked whether the budget provides enough staff and resources to fulfill that mission.

The following report focuses on those areas of the budget which took up the most time or elicited the most debate.

Superintendent Madancy fires up Powerpoint slides for the Board of Education. PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTO

Teacher Salaries

Some 61% of the school budget, about $80 million, goes to staff salaries, mostly for teachers. It was a natural question whether teacher salaries in Southington are in line with those offered by other Connecticut towns, and the Board raised it.

In his reply, Madancy noted that Southington has to be compared to towns that lie near it on a scale from rich to poor. The State has a system for classifying towns by wealth that has nine ‘buckets’ known as District Reference Groups, or DRGs for short. Southington is in the third wealthiest DRG, along with towns like North Haven and Newtown. Madancy projected a slide showing that teacher salaries in Southington are close to the average for its DRG.

There are two ways in which Southington departs from the mean. First, its per pupil spending, $19,930, is very low, relatively speaking, coming in at 132^nd out of all 160 public districts in the state; it is fourth from the bottom in our DRG. At the same time, its administrator-to-student ratio is relatively high, coming in second in our DRG.

New Lines

The budget does not propose to cut teaching staff, and at no point did any member of the Board suggest doing so. Instead, it includes a request for four new full-time lines, plus one-third of a line for a high school business teacher. Madancy took care to contrast this number with the 41 line requests he had originally received from departments.

A major question raised both Tuesday and Thursday night was whether the district should hire one additional social worker, at $83,992 per year, to help students who are in crisis or experiencing acute needs.

By the end of the two workshops, all who spoke up, including those who initially expressed some skepticism about the request, agreed that many students in the system need some kind of help. On Thursday, Assistant Superintendent Frank Pepe put the situation in numerical terms, noting that during the previous school year there were 595 crisis-level incidents among all of the districts students, 207 of which were handled by social workers alone. This year, he added, there have already been 349 incidents, 102 of which were handled by social workers, and another 247 where they needed to work with other professionals, such as the police. Madancy brought up a slide which somberly noted that in the past day, a social worker was called upon to work with a pair of elementary-school siblings whose parent had entered the hospital in terminal condition.

Two questions were debated and remained open at the end of the workshops: who should be responsible for addressing the needs of these students, and how far does the school system’s obligation extend? Board member Sean Carson asked whether social workers in the Southington school system are the only individuals who can help students in need. Would it be possible, for instance, for members of the Police Department to handle some of these issues? Or, as Board member Cecil Whitehead suggested, could high-school guidance counselors step in?

Madancy’s answer was that police officers are trained to defuse a situation and restore order, but that it is not part of their job to follow-up with students in crisis, or counsel those who may have been peripherally involved. Board Member Lisa Cammuso noted that social workers will often assist a student dealing with critical life issues over an extended period of time, something no other professional staff are trained to do. As for high school guidance counselors, Madancy said that handling life-and-death matters is not part of their job, and in any event they are not present in the elementary or middle schools.

Board member Joseph Baczewski argued that the parents of students often bear responsibility for the dysfunctional behaviors of their children, and that it seemed like overreach to try to tackle such deep-rooted problems when the district is only in contact with students six hours day. He also pointed out a potential tradeoff – money spent on social workers might instead be spent on students who strive to do well – that could, in his view, raise issues of fairness.

A New TESOL Teacher

Madancy’s budget includes a request for a new TESOL teacher line that would start at $68,335 per year. TESOL stands for ‘Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages’. Over the past five years, Southington’s school system has seen a sharp increase in the number of students who either come to school with no knowledge of the English language, or only have the ability to handle basic communication and struggle with the more sophisticated English of, say, homework assignments. According to Patricia Pettit and Simone Crouch, who came to the podium to address the issue, the number of such students has risen from 153 in 2020 to 261 in 2026; this increase seems to be due to more families moving to town from nearby communities, rather than places abroad. Southington students speak 31 different first languages.

At the moment there are two TESOL teachers to cover all of Southington’s elementary schools, another in the high school, and none in the middle schools. Each teacher is currently responsible for assessing about 87 students and providing them with supplemental lesson plans. The new line is designed mainly to cover the two middle schools, and in the process, reduce the 87:1 teacher/student ratio. State ECS funding should cover a large portion of the salary for the line.

No objections to the new line were raised by any member of the Board; several spoke in support of it. The situation was clearly an eye-opener for members, who expressed surprise at the number of new ‘multilingual learners,’ as they are called, and the sharp upward trend, which is expected to continue in years to come.

Insurance Headaches

A major driver of costs for the school system these days, as for many organizations, is rising health care costs. The District will have to budget $20,671,371 to cover health insurance costs, which represents a 9.06% increase over the previous year. The increase would have been even greater, were it not for a transfer of $500,000 in reserve funds, a step recommended by the Town’s Board of Finance.

Questions of how the Town should insure itself and its employees were for many years handled by its Self-Insurance Committee, which was a part of the Town Council. Following a suggestion from Councilor Tony Morrison, the Council voted in 2025 to give the Town’s Board of Finance the responsibility for handling these matters, which require a fair amount of accounting savvy.

At the Tuesday workshop, several Board members, including Colleen Clark, Zaya Oshana, and Cecil Whitehead, expressed concern that there seemed to be no clear process for anyone outside the Board of Finance to speak about the insurance question. As a result, the Board's options for handling a $20.6 million bill from Cigna for health insurance are unclear.

The Wheels on the Bus

The first few questions raised at Tuesday’s workshop had to do with the cost of bussing students. Board chair Zaya Oshana asked whether bus routes could be adjusted to reduce the number of vehicles the district needs to pay for, and member Bob Brown noted that many buses are at most half-full. Their questions were addressed by Director of Operations Peter Romano, who laid out some of the constraints involved. His written response reads, in part:

“Each year, we look for opportunities to reduce the number of buses required. One of our largest constraints is that Southington has more than 200 miles of roadway. In addition, Board of Education policy states that bus routes may begin no earlier than 45 minutes before the start of the school day. We also aim to have students arrive at school at least 10 minutes prior to the bell. Together, these parameters limit maximum bus travel time to approximately 35 minutes. High School routes drive the majority of our bus needs. When buses travel from the southwest (Wolcott), northwest (Bristol), and southwest (Meriden) corners of town, these time constraints become a significant challenge. On paper, the current average bus travel time for SHS is 31 minutes.”

Reducing the number of buses by having each vehicle pick up more students is difficult, then, because the added stops would threaten to push the travel time over 35 minutes.

In the ensuing discussion, the Board asked Madancy and Romano to look at other ways to reduce the number of buses, perhaps by requiring parents to opt-in for bus pickup, rather than opting out from a default.

Noresco and Energy Improvements

 

Oshana and Baczewski both asked for more details about a payment of some $850,000 to Noresco for equipment and services related to energy improvements. Back in 2014, the Town of Southington signed a contract with the Westborough, MA-based firm to provide it with energy savings through such means as the installation of more efficient LED lights, weatherization, and more sophisticated HVAC controls. The 15-year contract was for a total of $12.6 million, with the school system being responsible for 72.44% of the annual payments through 2030.

The Board’s basic question was, what is the District getting for its $850,000? In reply, Romano forwarded a report Noresco sent to the town last September. It claimed that during the previous fiscal year, Noresco’s improvements saved Southington $1,152,364 – $31,022 more than the guaranteed savings of $1,121,342. The report's remaining 92 pages offer a series of charts, timelines, and calculations that explain how these figures were arrived at.

Madancy acknowledged that these figures had to be taken with a grain of salt, given that the company determined its savings by comparing actual expenditures after improvements with hypothetical expenditures for an energy system that lacked said improvements.

Rubbish Removal

Eyeing a hike in costs for rubbish removal and recycling, Baczewski asked whether the District had courted other service contractors. Madancy replied that the District had in fact advertised the job in May. It received four bids and chose one, for $456,460, that undercut the next lowest bidder by nearly $100,000. He added that the vendor, Plainville-based CWPM, intentionally submitted a low bid to make sure no other firm won the contract. (CWPM’s operations manager is former Town Councilor Jack Perry.)

Snowplows and Robot Mowers

Leaving no stone unturned, the Board also scrutinized the budget for clearing snow from the school system’s parking lots and trimming the grass in its fields.

Cammuso and Board member Dawn Anastasio asked whether it was possible for existing employees of the Highway Department to take care of snow removal during storms. The reply from Romano was that, without an increase in staffing and equipment – which would be prohibitively expensive – the effort would run into a timing issue. If town staff were to add the school lots to their list of responsibilities, they would have to start work much earlier, around 1am; as a result, either the lots or town roads might well be covered by new snowfall before the schoolday began.

Similar arguments, Romano explained, apply to mowing the grass at the various schools in town. Those jobs are so big that they would require new investments in staff and equipment in order to adhere to a regular schedule of mowing. Outside contractors who currently do the job tend to work at very reasonable rates.

Perhaps the most out-of-the-box question of the entire workshop came from Baczewski, who wondered whether students at the high school could design and build a robot lawn mower that would complete the job with minimal human input.

Romano replied that one of the contractors for the High School field had in fact offered to trial a robot mower. Whether that experiment is tried remains to be seen.

A sample page from the Superintendent's budget. The workshops are intended to breathe life into these dry lists of numbers.