Dwight Gets The School-Funding Message

Mark Griffin had a front-row seat at opening night of a new neighborhood road show starring local education officials — and left vowing to write to his representatives from New Haven to Hartford to Washington, seeking more money for public schools. 

“Blumenthal, Rosa DeLauro, all those guys in Washington, D.C.,” everyone’s going to hear from him, Griffin said.

Griffin made that pledge after hearing school officials make a pitch at Tuesday night’s monthly Dwight Community Management Team meeting, held the auditorium of the Amistad charter elementary school on Edgewood Avenue.

It was their first stop on an unprecedented planned campaign to take the case for more education funding directly to taxpayers and voters.

Administrators revealed a night earlier that they are asking for at least $10.8 million more for the next school year. They argued that would be just enough to sustain current operations after two years of school closures and teacher layoffs.

With another $1.7 million on top of that, they say they could hire a few more teachers to keep up with state mandates, bring on a grant writer, replace the outdated math curriculum, consolidate student data servers, and maintain its $2 billion in construction projects.

Darnell Goldson, one of the hybrid school board’s elected representatives, told the neighborhood gathering that he hoped the presentation would answer questions about why the school district needs more money for its students.

“A lot of people don’t understand the largest section of the city’s budget, which is the Board of Education,” he said. ​“We figured if we gave you a primer on what we do, how we spend it, and where we are, you might be more willing to support both education and additional funding for education in the city.”

The seven-stop tour of the city’s community management teams kicked off in Amistad Elementary School’s gymnasium, now a charter school, where Superintendent Iline Tracey said she remembered being principal for a year before she went over to King-Robinson. She said it was ​“our families” and ​“our students” who were in need of more supports.

During the presentation, Griffin said that state lawmakers have only a short legislative session to get anything done this year. Based on his experience lobbying for addiction recovery services after being ​“clean” for 27 years, he said he knows that means his letters must get to the Appropriations and Education Committees stat.

Griffin said the cause of equitable funding is personal to him; he needed special education services himself in school. He said that he wants to see more kids able to get into their zoned schools, right across the street from where they live — a cause that the school board fought for this year.

“No child in the City of New Haven should be left behind, when it comes down to education,” Griffin said. ​“When it comes to special education, it’s needed. I’m going to write to my legislators to improve on education. Our curriculum has to be up to par. We have to bring it up. We have to better our education funding. Don’t cut; increase it.”

Just one day after he gave a more technical, 40-minute version of the presentation to the school board’s Finance & Operations Committee, Phillip Penn, the district’s new chief financial officer, had already refined his pitch into a deft, 10-minute appeal that other presenters before the community management team said was a model presentation.

Taking Goldson’s advice from Monday’s meeting, Penn compared New Haven’s per pupil spending to the Gold Coast suburbs, like Westport, Darien and New Canaan. They spend roughly $4,650 more on each kid, which adds up to a $98.9 million difference when multiplied across the city’s 21,260 kids.

“That’s an awful lot of money,” Penn said. ​“I’m not saying money solves every problem, but I like to try.”

Listeners had a few questions about why city schools had been flat-funded for so long, part of the reason why its budgets ended in the red for six of the past nine years.

How much were the string of recent deficits about the phase-out of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant? asked Doug Hausladen, the city’s transportation director.

How much was it about the recent declines in enrollment? asked Richard Crouse, a Yale grad student in neuroscience.

And does the district have a grant writer to drum up new revenue? asked Florita Gillespie, the management team’s chair.

Penn said those were all contributing factors. But he said that if funding had just kept pace with inflation, the school district would be sitting on $210 million, more than double the increase that the district is requesting for next school year.

To make the school district’s nine-figure budget comprehensible, Penn sought to simplify the complexities into a matter of household finances. He compared the $199 million budget to a family’s month-end checkbook-balancing.

“Our costs go up the same as they do in your household: You pay more for oil, for electricity, for groceries, for everything in your life,” he said. ​“The school district is no different. We struggle with what’s the best way to put the resources out there.”

Listeners murmured in agreement. Deirdre Dailey, a security officer who doesn’t have kids of her own, shook her head disapprovingly as Penn displayed a chart that showed the city’s share of non-restricted Educational Cost Sharing had largely been funded at the same level since 2012.

After the meeting, Dailey explained what was going through her head.

“I feel that they should put more into the school budget because that’s our future,” she said.

Dailey said she wanted the schools to put more money into a home-economics curriculum.

“These kids don’t even know how to take care of themselves,” she said. ​“They need basic fundamental things put back into school so they could know how to go out and live on their own. They need to start with those basics of survival.”

Would money help? ​“It can assist,” she said.

Throughout the presentation, Goldson sat in the gym’s front row next to two neighborhood alders, Tyisha Walker-Myers and Frank Douglass, who will ultimately decide how much to contribute to the largest line-item in the city’s budget.

“This is not a local fight,” Goldson said. ​“The state underfunds us. You all know the story: 56 percent of our real estate can’t be taxed because of state law. They don’t make up that money, hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s our real battle. We know the city doesn’t have money, because they don’t get it. We really need support to talk to state legislators.”

“These are my best friends,” Goldson added, about his seatmates.

“We just became best friends,” joked Walker-Myers, the Board of Alders president.

“What I think people really need to do is talk to people at the state, because it’s tricky with PILOT funding [payments in lieu of taxes]. It doesn’t say they have to give us a certain amount,” she went on, standing up to address her neighbors. ​“The only other way to get revenue is property taxes; the state made it up that way. People have to think about that reality.”

“When we budget, we have to rob Peter to pay Paul. If we look at what they’re asking, the city would go all the way down and cut services over here or there. You still want your trash picked up, your street cleaned, your snow plowed,” Walker-Myers concluded. ​“We have to figure out what services we want to keep in the city, how much we want to put toward each of those, because all of them are in the city budget.”

Goldson said he agreed he wasn’t trying to beat up on the Board of Alders, the city chamber of which he was once a member.

“Don’t let the state off the hook,” he said. ​“They have the money. We just have to make sure they prioritize education.”

“You’re speaking to the choir,” Walker-Myers said.