By CHRIS POWELL
Hamden Mayor Adam Sendroff says the town is in “a financial crisis.” Indeed, the town long has been struggling financially. So the mayor has asked town departments to reduce their budgets by 5%.
Connecticut’s minimum wage increase indicates worsening poverty
‘Affordability’ doesn’t apply to cost of state employees
Mayor panders to the mob, inviting more insurrection
But Hamden’s school superintendent, Gary Highsmith, has told the Board of Education not to worry about it. For state law forbids municipalities from reducing school budgets except in a few special circumstances, and even those don’t apply to Hamden, because, since the town’s students perform so poorly, the state Education Department has declared the school system an “alliance district,” where cutting spending is doubly prohibited.
Since Hamden’s schools spend about half the town’s money, any savings will have to be exacted disproportionately from the remaining half of town government.
One premise of the law forbidding cutting school budgets is that student performance correlates directly with per-pupil spending, though there is little evidence for that, since student performance is almost entirely a matter of parenting. The real premise of the law is that teacher unions, the largest political force in every city and town, must be gratified at any cost.
The law is based on another nonsensical premise — that school systems are perfectly efficient and effective so there is never any need to save money. Elected officials and taxpayers shouldn’t even think about it or ask critical questions. There’s no point in that, since saving money in lower education in Connecticut is actually against the law.
Yes, Connecticut should just keep raising taxes to gratify the teacher unions and keep electing the same people to run state government in the interest of the people on the payroll, not the interest of the public.
*
Three state government agencies are implicated in a spectacular waste of money that has failed to gain the attention of anyone in political authority.
According to the Norwich Bulletin, an assistant principal at Ellis Technical High School in Killingly, Roland Navarro, has been on paid administrative leave for four years, having collected nearly $600,000 in salary and many thousands more in fringe benefits, and even having taken an interim job with a real estate agency to get a second income while the agencies have been pondering what to do about him — even as it seems that there’s no reason to do anything.
The story goes this way.
One day in 2021 Navarro arrived at school forgetting that he had left a pistol in his car. He knew that guns are illegal on school property. A student rotating the tires on Navarro’s car found the pistol and alerted Navarro, who wrapped it up, took it outside, and put it in the trunk of another assistant principal’s car. At the end of the day he retrieved the pistol and took it home.
The school investigated and punished Navarro with a two-day suspension. But the state police, the Windham County state’s attorney, and the state Department of Children and Families began investigations as well. The state’s attorney charged Navarro with possession of a gun on school grounds, a felony.
Navarro pleaded not guilty and, predictably, the court granted him accelerated rehabilitation, a probation available to first offenders, since he hadn’t meant or done any harm. Accordingly in July 2024 the charge against him was dismissed.
But DCF and the state Board of Education, from which Navarro has a teaching license, kept investigating. The board now is said to be waiting for a hearing officer’s report on a jurisdictional issue Navarro raised. If he is allowed to keep his license, the technical school system can decide whether to reinstate or fire him.
Almost five years have passed and no one in authority has hastened the case to conclusion or just pulled the plug on it. The money spent investigating case well may exceed the $600,000-plus paid to Navarro during his leave.
His accidentally leaving a gun in his car may turn out to be the financial windfall of his life even as state government seems not to have noticed the expense.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 