Schools Budget Gets Close Scrutiny at Workshops
- Philip Thibodeau
- Jan 20
- 9 min read
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.
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 132nd 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.
