Five Questions For Superintendent Of Schools Jack Cross

Clinton taxpayers rejected the town and education budgets in the recent referendum. We asked Superintendent of Schools Jack Cross five questions about education costs, cost control and student performance.  

1. Why has the board of education budget been increasing in recent years during a period when school enrollment has been declining?

Cross: The primary issue with our budget over the last few years has been driven by our contractual agreements with our various personnel groups that were in place prior to the decline of the economy.

The second piece is that our transportation costs have been a part of the influence for the budget and our special ed out-of-district tuition costs, we have about 21 students that we provide special ed services for outside the district in specialized programs based on their needs. And that has been a driving force.

And then lastly, associated with the personnel has been the level of cost for insurance benefits, particularly the health benefits in the district that have gone up over the course of the last four or five years on average of about 10 percent. So those are all factors that have really driven the cost of the education budget at least in the four years that I’ve been here.

2. What has the board of education done to control costs?

Cross:  Again, I think in the course of the last three or four years with the economy being such that it is, we have really looked to take advantage of every time we’ve renegotiated our personnel contracts to look at how we can reorganize or change the structure of those contracts to reduce the rates of increase over the course of a one- two- or three-year period.

Most notably our recent arbitration with the teachers contract gives us a zero percent increase in the first year of the contract which would be for the next school year and then a 2.75 percent increase and a 2.75 percent increase over the course of the next two years.

We’ve also re-negotiated contracts with the secretaries association as well as the paraprofessionals and were in the process of beginning negotiations with the administrative group, the principals in the district. We’ve also gone out to bid for our transportation contract which ultimately we did three years ago and the net gain for that is just a little over a million dollar savings over the course of the life of that contract, a four-year contract.

This past year we went out to bid for insurance. We were able to negotiate through a combination of redesigning the teachers' benefit package and going out to bid to reduce our premium cost for this coming year to zero percent, so we have in the process of an insurance committee redesigning the plan for teachers and going out to bid we have been able to secure a zero percent increase in the insurance premiums for the 2011- 20012 school year. 

And then lastly we’ve taken a look at whenever we have replacements in personnel to really look at how we can best reorganize to make the most of the personnel that we have.  Most notably at this point this past summer we had a reading specialist a Pierson Elementary School who took on an administrative job in another district, and we sat down with the other reading specialist at the school, the school administration, the assistant superintendent and myself and really hammered out a plan to not replace the reading specialist with another reading specialist, but really to look at hiring the equivalent of four parttime paraprofessionals, all of which ended up being certified teachers to provide that service, so we ended up at half the cost being able to provide a reading intervention program that reached really probably three or four times as many students ultimately in the end.

3. What is the likely effect of the anticipated cuts in the board of education budget?

Cross: One of the things we did going into this budget year is that we had outlined a series of concerns that we had both in terms of this current school year and then also looking into the following school year 2012-2013.

One of the biggest issues that we were faced with going into the 2011-2012 budget was the fact that we were going to have a new governor and new legislators and there was significant concern about the education cost sharing grant which is a revenue to the town that is largely focused on education. That number for us is fairly significant. It’s a little over $6 million that’s considered revenue for the town and there was some concern that might get reduced. The last two years it had been talked about that it might reduced by about 14%, which starts to become a pretty significant impact on the revenue for the community and therefore for schools.

We also in that same time going into this year were fortunate enough to get some jobs funds money from the federal government which was directed specifically to schools to preserve teaching positions or to add teaching positions to the school district. In our current 2011-2012-budget proposal we have applied some of that money to positions that were not included in the actual budget and we held $200,000 of that in abeyance so that in the event that the ECS money was cut we would have some fallback.

At this point, the governor and what we think is a pretty strong notion that the ECS grant will not be cut and we can comfortably apply that $200,000 to our current budget and then we’re going to have to look for another $45-$50,000 in areas around professional development and other personnel areas at this point. Hopefully, as I indicated earlier, we will not have to tap any of our major programs. We won’t have to reduce after school programming at this time.

3. Measurable goals for student achievement are now a part of public education. How is Clinton doing on standardized testing?

Cross: On the whole our students perform reasonably well. We continue as with many districts to struggle to increase the meet the goal standard on both CMT’s and the CAPT. Recently it’s been discussed that on the state ConnCAN website that we have been identified as being 47th in the state and we have talked about this at several occasions that ultimately people don’t quite understand what that means.

First of all, from the ’09 school year to the ’10 school year, we’ve actually moved up on the ladder at our high school level from 47th to 45th in the state and that’s really a ranking based on 133 high schools that reported, which puts us in the top third in the state. 

It also is the measurement is really based on the number of students, or the percentage of students who me goal on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test on all four of the assessments and so 61% of our kids made or earned or performed at goal level at the high school level and that represented about a 5% increase over the previous year. So that’s one example of our improvement. We can show similar kinds of improvement on the CMT or the Connecticut Mastery Test at all other grade levels. All students in grade levels three through 8 are assessed on the Connecticut Mastery Test and we have shown significant improvement in all of those grade levels.

Most notably I would say that the middle school where we were acknowledged actually on the same ConnCAN site as being a banner school that had shown significant improvement. So I think the hard part for me as a superintendent at this point is while those standards are important, we are also working on our curriculum program for all disciplines and have identified some foundation skills and competencies that we believe that are as critical or more critical than either the CMT or the CAPT and that we need to balance the combination of both of those.

We want our kids to be able to demonstrate performance and high achievement on the state assessments but there are many other things that we think are of critical importance as well. So trying to strike that balance is probably the most difficult thing that we’re doing at this point because we are seemingly measured only by state tests and that’s not the only thing we’re asking our kids to do.

5. Please describe the challenges of improving test scores in the face of reduced or frozen funding.

Cross: Well as you can imagine that with less funds it becomes a little bit more difficult to channel specialized programs particularly some of our intervention programs, harder to provide the materials and resources when we renew or redo a curriculum area. But that said, one of the things that we have done over the course of the last two years, in the light of budget reduction is that we have been very judicious about where we take those cuts.

Our primary concern is to make sure that in those budget reductions that we look at minimizing any impact that we have on students. And so with a group, my administrative team, two years ago when we had the first major reduction, really sat down and identified priority areas for us to use as kind of a litmus or a channel for how we were going to go about reducing funds.

The first and foremost was the fact that we all agreed that anything that had to do with literacy was critical to maintaining. So we really focused on any of the any of the literacy areas that would be impacted by budget we tried to hold sacred and then we also looked at core programs like our all day kindergarten and our world language program, the K-12 program. Those are programs that are special and unique to Clinton.

We are one of very few school districts in the state that have all-day K and a K-12 world language program, in this case Spanish. Both are critical to the development of literacy and the expansion of literacy. Spanish instruction does also benefit students developing literacy in their first language and certainly the first exposure in kindergarten is critical. And so we held those things as being sacred and looked for other ways to reduce costs.

Where we ended up, as I talked about earlier, we looked at how we can save money in other ways: transportation contracts, insurance contracts, etc. Reorganizing when we could. And then we’ve also had to tap some of our professional development funding so we’re doing more in house with less money. Then in the last couple of years we have had to reduce some of our after school programming opportunities that were more enrichment in nature but not just enrichment, but largely some added programs. We are trying to hold tight to those this year going into the 2011-2012 budget. Hopefully at this point we won’t have to tap that.

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