From the Mind of Jason Zandri

By Samaia Hernandez
Record-Journal staff
shernandez@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2266

As published in the Record Journal Sunday March 7, 2010

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WALLINGFORD — Salvatore Menzo became chief of the town’s public schools last year, taking over a district 10 times larger than the one in Marlborough, where he began his career as a superintendent in 2005.

In his first budget season Menzo has pulled out many stops, from proposing to reconfigure the elementary schools to slashing more than 100 jobs. In the end, the Board of Education approved a plan for 2010-11 that cuts more than 80 positions without restructur­ing schools. The budget proposal is now in the hands of the Town Council and the mayor for likely revision and eventual approval.

School board officials have called this year the “toughest” budget in district his­tory.

Given rising costs, including those of contractual agreements, without making any cuts, Menzo said, the school board would have been looking at a budget in­crease of roughly 10 percent over the cur­rent year.

One of the ways he came up with the $88.9 million request, a 4.56 percent in­crease, is the same method the state De­partment of Education uses to gauge school performance: comparing school systems in the same District Reference Group, or DRG.

With salaries and benefits accounting for about 80 percent of the budget, a look at staffing levels alone shows Wallingford at the high end among systems of compa­rable size and makeup.

The state came up with the reference groups for reporting purposes and to group districts of comparable enrollment and socioeconomic composition. Classi­fied by the letters A through I, the smallest and wealthiest districts fall in the A cate­gory and the poorest and largest in I.

In group D, Wallingford is one of 24 school systems, from Berlin to Milford to Shelton to Southington to Wethersfield.

“It allows comparisons, apples-to­-apples comparisons,” said Thomas Mur­phy, spokesman for the education depart­ment. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t compare outside of DRG, but DRGs can help when you’re trying to compare the relative.”

For example, he said, “a large urban district that would serve a student population that has a high poverty level could compare itself to another simi­lar community to determine what the relative performance is.”

Though its total enrollment is 43 students short of Southington’s 6,826, Walling­ford has 24.6 more teachers than the nearby system and more than twice as many para­professionals, according to the 2008-09 Strategic School Pro­files for the districts. These numbers do not include spe­cial education teachers and staff.

Though few districts in its DRG have faced cuts as substantial or controversial as Wallingford’s, some officials say it’s just a matter of delay­ing the inevitable.

“I think that it shows that in some of our non-certified ar­eas we do have more staff than other districts, and in some other areas we are higher,” Menzo said. “I’m not trying to say that we shouldn’t have the staff that we have; it’s just I think that when we’re faced with difficult times, we have to look at all the data that’s pro­vided for us. If we weren’t in difficult times, we would maintain high levels (of staff), but in difficult times, it re­quires us to take as much data as we can to make the best de­cision.”

Southington’s school board unanimously approved an $80,441,401 request for 2010-11, an increase of 4.69 percent. In his seventh year on Southing­ton’s school board and his third as chairman, Brian Goral­ski was prepared for an “in­credibly lean” year, but was happily surprised when the budget process went smoothly, without any significant cuts.

“What it boils down to is what a community can sup­port,” he said. “Our commu­nity, I’m grateful, has been a proponent and supporter of education.”

Though the system got by without cutting staff this year, it has experienced growing class sizes at the middle and high schools.

“We’re doing the best to keep what we have,” Goralski said.
When Shelton proposed cutting 69 jobs, the unions came together, from adminis­trators to teachers, to find $700,000 in givebacks. But now Shelton School Superin­tendent Freeman Burr will likely be forced to make cuts, given the mayor’s announce­ment that he plans to cut $3 million from the school board’s $66,535,340 proposal, which was a 5.6 percent in­crease. Shelton’s school sys­tem has 5,547 students.

Like Southington, Milford, a district larger than Wallingf­ord’s, with an enrollment of 7,303 managed to get by this year without any major staff reductions.

“Overall, we’ve had very good support from the city, but it’s dealing with concerns about revenue, with the econ­omy being the way it is,” said acting School Superintendent Mike Cummings. Milford’s $85 million budget represents an increase of nearly 5 percent.

But Cummings predicts things will be much worse next year, after federal stimu­lus money has dried up. What managed to work this year might not fly next budget sea­son.

“I think what they’re trying to do in Wallingford is inter­esting work,” he said. “They’re trying to actually save money over years.

“Eventually, everybody’s go­ing to be in the same position.”