Hamden Ed Boarders Seek More Money

With funds for equity among PTAs, curriculum rewrites, and a new academic summer camp, the Hamden Board of Education’s Finance Committee has advanced a budget that includes either a 2.27 or 3.6 percent increase over last year’s, depending on how you do the accounting.

The committee approved the district’s 2020 – 2021 budget Thursday evening in a unanimous vote after about three weeks of reviewing and editing it.

The budget will now go to the full board on Wednesday for final approval. It will then go to the mayor, who must decide whether or not to give the board its full funding request in the budget he proposes to the town’s council.

After reviewing Superintendent Jody Goeler’s budget and making changes here and there, the Finance Committee came up with a budget that would cost the town $91.4 million. That’s an increase of about $2 million, or 2.27 percent, over last year’s $89.4 million.

Goeler said that in this budget, he had aimed to ​“make a difference with our underserved communities in Hamden.”

Hamden is in a tough financial position, and the board may see its funding request chopped once the mayor and the council have to reckon with the staggering expenses they must fund. With over $1 billion in long-term liabilities and a mill rate that makes Hamden the sixth-highest-taxed municipality in the state, the mayor and council will be loathe to hand out budget increases that could mean raising taxes.

Yet over the last few years, the district has been reckoning with the fact that it is deeply segregated by race. It has also heard loud and clear from parents that it needs to fix inequities between its schools and between students of different racial and socio-economic backgrounds. Parents and community members have also demanded that the district devote resources to making its curriculum and teaching staff more reflective of its student body. (Read about those conversations here, and here.)

The budget includes a few new line items or expanded lines that aim to improve equity across the district. It includes $125,000 to smooth over inequities between Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) at the district’s elementary schools.

At the moment, there are vast disparities between the amounts PTAs in the district are able to fund, meaning that students at some schools can participate in a rich array of programming that is not offered at other schools. The Spring Glen PTA, for example, will spend almost $34,000 on programming for students at Spring Glen in the current school year, according to its website.

At the Church Street School on the other hand, even having a PTA is too expensive, because PTAs require fees. Rather, the school has a PTO (parent teacher organization), which struggles to raise two or three thousand dollars in a school year. The district’s new $125,000 equity funding will help fund programming at schools like Church Street where PTAs cannot raise enough.

The budget also includes $300,000 for a new summer camp program to take place at Church Street. If the board approves it, it will provide an educational summer camp for free to 150 low-income elementary school students. Right At School, which currently runs before and after-school programs in the district, would operate the camp. Families who don’t qualify to send their students for free may pay tuition on a sliding price scale based on income.

Some students in the district travel around the world and go see Broadway productions over the summer, while others do not have the means, said Goeler. The camp will allow the district to provide a summer opportunity for students who wouldn’t get one otherwise. He said it would also help stop the ​“summer slide,” when students forget what they learned over last school year during the summer.

A new allotment of $90,000 would help the district reopen a family resource center, which it had at the Ridge Hill School until the state defunded it two years ago. Family resource centers help teach parents skills and give them resources for raising their children. The district used to have two: at Church Street and at Ridge Hill, until the Ridge Hill program closed. Now, it may reopen.

The budget also includes an additional $200,000 for rewrites to the curriculum. Though rewrites happen every year, the extra funding is aimed at making the curriculum more reflective of the town’s racial and cultural diversity. It will also pay for extra professional development days to help teachers teach new material. 

One significant increase from last year’s budget is in the cost of special education. Special education costs in the current fiscal year are running significantly over budget.

For instance, in the current fiscal year, the costs of tuition for special education students attending out-of-district public schools are running $776,000 over budget. Tuitions for special education students at non-public schools are running $945,000 over budget.

The proposed budget would bump up special education funding in the next fiscal year to the full amount it is projected to cost in the current fiscal year: about $32.3 million, which is about 35 percent of the budget.

“Special education is a very difficult budget to draft because there are many unanticipated costs associated with it,” said Goeler.

2.27 Percent Or 3.6 Percent?

While the budget total is shown as $91.4 million, that number is achieved only by taking back $1.2 million in state grant funding that the town counted as revenue in the current fiscal year’s budget. The town and the board act as semi-autonomous entities, and the board collects some grants itself, rather than having them channeled through the town first. Each year, the district gets about $5.8 million from the state through the Alliance grant program, which provides extra funds to the state’s 33 lowest-performing school districts. In budget negotiations last year, the council and BOE agreed that the board would not use $1.2 million of its Alliance funds. The board will give it to the town, counting is as a ​“surplus,” so the town can use it as revenue.

The town had never used that funding plan before. This year, the board’s Finance Committee opted to take that $1.2 million back and use it to fund district expenses, as the grant is meant to do. That means that, though the board is asking for just $2 million more than it did last year, it is also asking to take back another $1.2 million that the town counted as revenue. With the $1.2 million counted as an additional ask of the town, the full cost of the board’s budget could also be considered $92.6 million, or 3.6 percent over last year.

While the number at the top of budget spreadsheets is $91.4 million, that number is far less than the actual cost of operating the district. Many of the district’s costs are paid for with federal and state grants, which are not shown in the $91.4 million figure. That number is just what the district is asking the town to fund with taxpayer dollars and with state education funding that is paid to the town rather than directly to the board. The true cost of running the school district, including the costs paid for by grants, exceed $100 million.