What Price Education?

Trying to assess value in a town where life, on the whole, is pretty good, is an exercise in counting riches. Imagine if we were to put the whole town on the block in one giant tag sale and had to come up with a price for everything we value about this place beyond our own personal property lines. What prices would we put on all the tags? The flagpole? How about a million bucks? The trout in Deep Brook? Twenty-five dollars a pound? Clearly it is going to take some thought. This exercise is not far from the process Newtown voters should be going through now as they prepare to vote on Tuesday on a battery of referendum questions that will go a long way toward defining the value of this town for years to come.

At the top of our list of things to think about it: What price education? Two thirds of the annual $105 million town budget (the first question on the ballot) and all of the $38.8 million appropriation for expanding the Newtown High School (the second question on the ballot) are earmarked for maintaining and improving the town’s school district. This is a lot of money in a town known for pinching pennies and making do, but we can say with certainty that education has been and always will be a priority in Newtown. When it comes time to choose between neglecting potholes and neglecting children, there is never any hesitation.

Newtown’s budget review process has become rigorous in recent years, with multiple hearings and reviews by the Legislative Council, the Board of Finance, the Board of Education, and the Board of Selectmen. While budgets do still emerge from the process that fail to win voter approval, taxpayers can be assured that the real debate these days is over the relative value of the critically necessary versus the merely necessary. Consequently, we do not hesitate to recommend approval of the proposed 2008-2009 budget.

Though the critical review of the proposed $38.8 million appropriation for the high school expansion has been less rigorous and more narrowly focused, we also recommend the approval of the project. The divisions this project left in its wake as it made its way through the boards of selectmen, finance, and the Legislative Council highlight the frustrations felt by those overseeing the town’s finances in their dealings with the Board of Education on this issue. As with all public expenditures there are two fundamental areas of concern: need and cost.

The need for an expansion is universally acknowledged; the need for this particular expansion is the focus of the sharpest debate on this issue. Unfortunately, the definitive answer lies in enrollment figures out in the future, ten or 15 years down the road. The best we can do in calculating our future experience is to triangulate with the help of our past experience, and our past experience tells us definitively that experts routinely underestimate enrollments by 13, 14, even 15 percent. Even if their accuracy improves to, say, an underestimation of ten percent, the town will need a high school addition at least as big as the one proposed.

Ultimately, we may find that the estimate of the project cost is where the real guesswork has taken place. There has been no peer review of the cost projections prepared by the architect of the expanded school facility. Fortunately, the bidding process itself is a kind of peer review of last resort; contractors will tell us soon enough whether the cost estimates are too low. If they are, the irony will be that the Board of Education’s plan will face precisely the kind of redesign, and added cost that its members have warned against in promoting the expeditious approval of this project without a more rigorous review costs.

Notwithstanding the deficiencies in how this project made it to the ballot, the need to reduce the overcrowding at Newtown High School is so compelling that any hesitation by voters at this point may close the door on whatever opportunity there may remain to address a critical problem directly affecting the education of our children. As we place a value on the resolution of this problem, we must be careful not to convert its price from dollars and cents to the dearer currency of neglect.