Budget Buster

To the Editor:

A review of the town’s 2007 audited financial statements provides a telling story of a budget process that continues to bust our wallets. And the budget buster is easy to spot: Public Education. Since 2003, fully 90 percent of the town’s budget increase has come from that line item. It has grown by over one third, an increase of $17 million, while the rest of the budget has grown in pace with the rate of inflation. During these past five years, the schools have added 70 employees (accounting for all of the growth in municipal employees) while only adding 450 students. Simple math suggests that every new student enrollment since 2003 has increased the education budget by $38,000 a year, which is more than the average yearly per capita income in Newtown.

And now we’re faced with significant cost overruns on a new building, and the future budget ramifications of a new building: large annual increases in fixed costs of operations, more employees and more variable costs, thus busting future yearly budgets for public education. Given the past five years’ track record, it is likely that the marginal cost of any new student will now rise to astronomical proportions, somewhere close to $50,000 a year. That’s more per year than a full-board tuition in a private college and simply unjustifiable by any standard.

The residents of Newtown have constantly buckled under the spurious argument that “our kids deserve all we can provide.” Well at $50,000 a year for every new student, it seems we’ve reached the limits of that argument, so it’s now time to say no more to the busting of dollars from our wallets, and to freeze the line item in our town’s budget that has been out of control far too long.

Francois de Brantes

13 Sugar Street, Newtown                                      September 3, 2008