Antares Ensemble, With Sarah Wolfson,
Will Perform Friends Of Music Season Finale
The Antares Ensemble takes advantage of its unique instrumentation by present...
Public Works Panel Digs Deep
Into Budget For Savings
By John Voket
Chairman Richard Woycik went into a protracted noontime meeting of the Legislative Council P...
Berthelson To Talk About The Greatest Showman On Earth, April 11 For Historical Society
Bethel’s own P.T. Barnum is a fascinating study in American ...
With April Fools’ Day on Friday, who would you most want to prank? And what prank would you most like to pull off?
Casey McLean: I would want to foo...
Newtown Toastmasters Announce Contest Winners
In March, Newtown Toastmasters hosted a standing-room-only audience for a Tall Tales and International Speech cont...
Standing on the well-lit porch of the white two-story house at 34 Church Hill Road, the demolition man, Ray Foster, mused, “This must have been a ni...
Congratulations to Chris Capozziello, who was the one reader able to tell us that last week’s challenge (inset) is the lantern hanging over the fron...
Capeci: Timing Of Charter Referendum May Have Been Its Undoing
By John Voket
By 4 pm Tuesday, March 29, with just under 600 referendum votes cast, Legislative ...
BOE Referendum, Round Two, UnderwayRegistered Newtown voters are heading to the polls today, for the second attempt by the Board of Education to get a budget for the 2024-25 academic year passed.Registered Newtown voters are heading to the polls today, for the second attempt by the Board of Education to get a budget for the 2024-25 academic year passed.All voting is again taking place at Newtown Middle School, 11 Queen Street. Polls opened at 6 am and will remain open until 8 pm.Following a rejection of the school budget by 507 votes at a referendum on April 23, the Legislative Council at its April 29 meeting slashed $1,408,307 from the Board of Education’s proposed 2024-25 budget.The reduction was unanimously approved by all 12 councilmen, in contrast to a previous, pre-referendum meeting on March 27, where no bottom line for the school budget drew more than a simple majority of seven votes.The new bottom line of $87,409,066 is a $2,339,415 or 2.75% spending increase over the 2023-24 budget, which places it in line with the municipal budget, which was passed by voters.The previous proposed 2024-25 BOE budget rejected by voters was $88,817,373, which would have been a $3,747,722 or 4.4% spending increase.The education budget failed, 1,701 No votes to 1,194 Yes votes.On the secondary question to the education budget — If the proposed sum for the Board of Education is not approved, should the revised budget be higher? — the responses were 727 Yes and 2,071 No.The Registrar of Voters reported 15.1% of Newtown’s registered voters participated in the April 23 referendum, with 2,952 people showing up at the middle school to vote and another 47 turning in absentee ballots.
It is a shame but yes, we are so broke... The NIMBY crowd will not allow any new development so there is no ability to add to the tax base... got to hire strangers to park at our schools, and grocery stores and sneak around on our property to ensure our kindergartners Spanish class doesn't get canceled.
I was the recipient of such a invasion of my privacy when my daughter was visiting her boyfriend in Waterbury. They tried to get me to pay them taxes instead of Newtown. They were rude, offensive and threatening and I had to call the mayor of Waterbury to finally get it cleared up after being threatened. It was a long drawn out process to get this overturned. Are we that broke that we have to turn our residents over to these mercenaries? This is beyond belief. How dare you hire these rent a cops to harass and threaten us?
Thanks for the quote, many people don’t realize Newtown does not exist in a silo and we have peers to benchmark against. For example Trumbull also spends less per student and outperforms us.
ALL students benefit from consistent policies and quality education. Affordability matters, especially to less affluent families which tend to skew more heavily minority based on census data.