Elementary School Board butts head with parents who want to rehire para-educators.
This piece originally appeared in The Vermont Standard.
An unexpected staff vacancy at Hartland Elementary School has resurrected an issue that its Board of Directors felt was settled by last month’s vote on the town education budget. Assistant Principal Scott Gray recently notified the Board that he will not return next year; some residents and faculty have suggested that the $63,000 in salary and benefits freed up as a result could be used to restore some of the para-educator positions that had been eliminated for the upcoming academic year. Tom Kennedy, Chairperson of the Board, says that Gray will not be replaced with another Assistant Principal; instead, Principal Judith Callens’ role will be expanded, and the Board will hire a Dean of Students.
Last summer, the Vermont Department of Education set year-over-year spending reduction targets for school Supervisory Unions across the state, to achieve an overall 2.34% decrease for the 2011/12 school year. Hartland Elementary School anted up its share by trimming general expenditures, consolidating some teaching functions, reducing several staff positions to part-time, and cutting the number of its para-educators from 15 to 10. The final proposed $7.67 million budget, which also includes tuition costs for high schoolers and Hartland’s assessment for the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union, represents a decrease of 1.09% over current year anticipated costs. It was approved on March 1 by a two to one margin, with 490 of Hartland’s 2,431 registered voters weighing in.
Records from fall and winter School Board meetings, however, indicate that cutting the para-educators, which will be accomplished through one retirement and four lay-offs, was intensely debated. The teachers’ helpers, who work with small groups of students, “are the heart and soul in the younger classes,” said one participant in a December 20 review of the proposed budget.
Kennedy says that at least 20 members of the public attended a special meeting on April 6 that the School Board called on the heels of Gray’s resignation to discuss options. Although he acknowledges that most of the meeting’s attendees pressed the Board to consider restoring the para-educators, “we discussed had this at length during the budget season,” he says, “the School Board made a decision, and the voters in Hartland made a decision.” The rationale for choosing to cut para-educators, he adds, was in part provided by a study that indicated Hartland Elementary, with a student population of just over 300, had a disproportionately large number of the teachers’ helpers, two and a half times that of comparable schools.
Life-long Hartland resident Marian Comstock disagrees that her fellow townspeople voted to cut para-educators.
“They voted the budget in for the fact that there was no increase in taxes,” she says.
She’s frustrated with the Board’s apparent unwillingness to revisit their decisions now that some additional funds are available. “They refused to even discuss it,” she says.
Chairperson Kennedy says that leaving the Assistant Principal position open was initially on the table, but that discussion at the April 6 meeting quickly turned to choosing between finding another Assistant Principal to replace Gray or modifying the school’s management model and hiring a Dean of Students. Now, Judith Callens is principal for grades 5-8 and Gray for grades K-4. The alternative model would make Callens principal of all grades, K-8. A Dean of Students would handle discipline, oversee transportation and substitutes, and have other responsibilities, to be determined.
The Board decided, unanimously, to pursue the Dean of Students model. It is “partially a cost savings,” says Kennedy, as a Dean of Students is not required to have an administrator’s license and therefore may be less expensive, “but also recognizes that we don’t have as many students in the school…and maybe there isn’t a need for an Assistant Principal.” The new position will a five-day-a-week job during the school year, where the Assistant Principalship had been cut back to four days. When hired, the new Dean will be contracted for only one year, Kennedy adds, giving the Board the flexibility to re-examine the effectiveness of this approach next year. And, they may re-evaluate the para-educator issue as well.
“If we have cut too many and it seems like it’s having an adverse impact…then we will reconsider,” he says of future budget determinations.
Comstock argues that “now would be the perfect time” to figure out if the school could get by without either an Assistant Principal or Dean of Students, and “no one would be losing a job.”
She also wonders why the April 6 meeting was arranged so hurriedly. According the office of Superintendent Donna Moyer, the agenda for the meeting was posted on Monday, April 4 at the Town Clerk’s office and in the Hartland Elementary School staff room, and emailed to parents. The meeting was announced at school, and a copy of the agenda given to all staff members. Comstock, whose children are no longer in the school, found out about the meeting only when a friend telephoned a couple of hours before its scheduled start.
Kennedy says the decision to call the special meeting on relatively short notice rather than wait for the Board’s next regularly scheduled April 28 meeting was because “time is of the essence at this point…we’re going to need to be advertising.”
The Vermont Open Meeting Law permits public bodies to schedule special meetings, with 24 hours notice. The Law also requires, however, that notices be posted “in or near the municipal’s clerk’s office and in at least two other public places in the municipality.”