State Could Penalize Schools for Cutting Too Much From Budgets

The state Department of Education is threatening to penalize six school districts for cutting too much out of their education budgets.

The agency sent letters to Killingly, Southington, Watertown, Canterbury, Montville and Groton saying these districts are cutting too much.

See the letter to Montville.

The threat of penalties comes amid drastic state funding cuts and more state money on hold to municipalities.

Groton’s letter said the district is not meeting the minimum budget requirement (MBR) for the current school year by almost $1.6 million. If they don’t fix it, the reduction to their Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant would be $3.1 million.

"Three teachers were reduced, unfortunately, so we restored those immediately and we had a significant underfunding of our paraprofessional accounts," Groton Superintendent Dr. Michael Graner said about his budget fixes, adding he got the letter in error.

Graner said he fixed the problem months ago but that’s because Groton became an Alliance District, which is a program targeted at helping the state’s lowest-performing districts. The district not losing any ECS funding from the state and the cuts were made when he thought he was, according to Graner.

Montville schools also got the letter from the state that said their budget was shot by a little under $178,000.

“We set a budget where we could afford and that would support our students in a really good way and we were all comfortable with that. So for us to now be penalized and punished by the state is just unimaginable,” Montville Superintendent Brian Levesque said.

Between the cuts in the state budget and Gov. Dannel Malloy’s holdbacks to ECS funding, Montville schools are shorted about $1.65 million in state aid, according to Levesque.

But the Department of Education is saying holdbacks do not count as state reductions for purposes of minimum budget requirements.

“When it came to me I was dumbfounded that the state was going to say that a holdback was not a reduction,” Levesque said.

Before all of this, Levesque said he consulted the state to make sure Montville schools were in compliance and he thought he was based on those conversations. Levesque also doesn’t think the money held back is coming back to him.

Levesque said the district can’t operate at a deficit.

“The irony of all this is I could go to my town and put the $177,000 dollars back into the budget and then in a separate motion, ask them to vote to hold that money back in this year’s budget – just like the state did,” Levesque said. “Now that is was not reduced, but a holdback, they wouldn’t say we didn’t meet the MBR.”

Levesque doesn't believe that is the answer.

A spokesman for the Department of Education Peter Yazbak said the state has heard back from all six districts. Three have assured the state they’ll not be in violation, while the other three said they might need some help. The state believes those districts won’t be in violation.

The penalties would impact next year’s budget but no one will see them until the end of this fiscal school year.

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