As pressures rise on public schools, Connecticut financial support shrinks

FALLS VILLAGE — As school boards settle in for the annual budget season they are confronted (again) with mandates from the state — new initiatives and programs that are required by the state or federal government and that are often expensive to implement.

This is especially true in small towns such as those in the Region One School District, where the population is small and so there is no economy of scale.

Most vexing to town and school officials trying to contain costs in difficult economic times, is that these mandates rarely come with grants or other funding to help the schools implement them.

Region One Superintendent Patricia Chamberlain and the region’s supervisor of special education, Martha Schwaikert, met with The Lakeville Journal this week to go over some of the more significant state mandates that will affect taxpayers in the six towns in the district: Cornwall, Falls Village, Kent, North Canaan, Salisbury and Sharon.

Each town has its own elementary school; all six share Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

New intervention program

The schools are implementing a system of Scientific Research-Based Interventions (SRBI), a regimen that must be in place by July of this year.

The SRBI revamps the method by which students with specific difficulties are identified and lists what additional measures are needed.

The SRBI system is arranged in “tiers.� In Tier I, which is classroom instruction, a child might have trouble with reading, for example, and require additional instruction in Tier II. The additional instruction is called an “intervention.�

The extra instruction can be in large or small groups, and may take place in the classroom or another setting.

Students’ progress is monitored, and if difficulties persist, a student receives Tier III assistance: individualized instruction.

If Tier III is not enough, the child is then referred to the Pupil Services department, which provides special education in Region One.

The difference between this system and the one it replaces is that in the past a child was tested, but the time between the evaluation and the intervention was as long as nine weeks. This could be frustrating for children and parents looking for answers.

With SRBI, the student is evaluated frequently at the classroom level to assess progress — or lack of progress. Schwaikert said that, should a child ultimately be referred to Pupil Services, there will already be a considerable amount of data available on his or her performance.

The catch is that the increased evaluation and monitoring require time and staff, and that is where budget considerations come in.

Salisbury Central School is a year ahead of other schools in the district in implementing SRBI, and at the January meeting of the town’s Board of Education parents spoke in favor of increasing the hours of the reading and math specialists who are responsible for much of the SRBI work.

Add in a teacher resigning and concerns over class sizes, and board members in that town are looking at a delicate balancing act. Do they not hire a replacement and increase the hours of the part-time specialists? Or not hire a replacement and keep the status quo for specialists? Or hire a replacement and increase the hours?  Or make the specialists full-time employees?

And what solution is going to be acceptable to any town’s board of finance — and to voters, who must approve the budgets for the coming year?

The terms “part-time� and “full-time equivalent� might suggest an educational bargain for beleagured budgeteers, but it’s not that simple.

The specialists typically earn a percentage of the teacher’s salary schedule for their education and experience level once the specialist is a .5 full-time equivalent, depending on the contract. (Chamberlain said that a .2 full-time equivalent employee teaches the equivalent of one class at the secondary level.)

Thus a teacher with a master’s degree and one year’s experience with a .5 position would earn $20,737.50, or half of an MA1’s salary of $40,475.

Or a teacher with a master’s degree plus 13 years’ experience,  working a .5 FTE job, would earn half of $75,313, or $37,656.50.

Part-timers working .5 full-time equivalent or above may also participate in the teachers’ health insurance plan, paying a rate proportionate to their hours. Again, these details vary from contract to contract.

Mentoring for faculty

The state has also mandated the Teacher Education and Mentoring program (TEAM), which provides support and continuing professional development for beginning teachers.

“Normally when the state asks for something, we have to do it seven times,� said Chamberlain, referring to the six elementary schools in the towns plus Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

But with TEAM, Region One is participating as a discrete unit, which is more efficient.

“But it stretches us in other ways,� said Chamberlain. “There are hidden costs — professional development, the cost of training.�

So far, ECS funds still there

The state was able to keep the annual Educational Cost Sharing grants to towns steady during the last budget go-round, largely thanks to money received from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus package�).

Chamberlain was not sanguine about that level of state assistance remaining stable, however.

And state budget problems have a ripple effect in the Pupil Services budget. Schwaikert said when the cost of educating a child in special education exceeds four-and-a-half times the average per-pupil expenditure in the district, the state is supposed to pay 100 percent of the additional expense.

“That has never happened,� added Chamberlain. Last year the amount of state reimbursement dropped to 70 percent, and she estimates it will decline further, to 60 percent.