Christopher Peak Photo
Phillip Penn, New Haven’s new CFO, with Iline Tracey.
After more than a yearlong search, the school district has finally hired a chief financial officer.
The Board of Education unanimously voted to appoint Phillip Penn, a suburban town official a head-hunting firm identified, to that top administrative position at its Tuesday evening meeting at King-Robinson School in Beaver Hills.
Penn, currently the chief financial officer for the town of Canton, will officially start on Nov. 18. He will be paid an annual salary of $185,000.
“Having the opportunity to influence the educational outcomes for that many kids, if that doesn’t give you purpose in your professional career I don’t know what’s going to,” Penn said at the meeting.
Iline Tracey, New Haven’s acting school superintendent (ever since Superintendent Carol Birks was offered a separation deal that she still hasn’t signed), picked Penn from among the final candidates who’d each gone through a six-person interview.
She said that Penn had distinguished himself from the rest as a “very even-keeled person” who could talk about school finance without relying on jargon.
Penn will be the first person in the role since Victor De La Paz left to work for the Achievement First charter network in mid-2016.
The Board of Ed deliberates at its Tuesday night meeting.
Penn was hired almost eight months after Birks made a verbal offer to another candidate. But after a follow-up with City Controller Daryl Jones, who’d been pressuring the school system to work more closely with City Hall, Birks stopped answering his emails and eventually rescinded the offer.
Right away, Penn will need to figure out how to deal with an unbalanced budget. In the past few months, the size of its deficit has fluctuated by tens of millions of dollars, and the cost-cutting measures have threatened to eliminate dozens of teaching positions and thousands of school bus stops.
As an overworked staff has been trying to keep the books straight (and once making a paperwork mistake that potentially lost out on millions of dollars in magnet school tuition), a committee of volunteers has been looking for savings.
Even some alders argued they should not add more money to the school budget, because they aren’t sure it would be spent right without a chief financial officer.
“I know there’s some challenges ahead, but what I’ll tell you is they’re not unique to New Haven,” Penn said. “Tighter budgets, less revenue and greater needs, but you’ll hear that wherever you go.”
Tracey said that, during his presentation to the interviewers, Penn “knew what he was talking about.” “He had a plan,” she said. “He studied up on our context before he came.”
Asked whether she thought Penn might pursue choice-based reforms for New Haven’s finances, like the student-based budgeting that De La Paz had proposed, Tracey quickly said no. “He’s for public education,” she stated.
Welcome, Mr. Penn! I'm looking forward to a new era of financial management and transparency.