Norwich School leaders defended their proposed $87.5 million 2021-22 budget before the City Council on Tuesday and discussed how the projected $26 million in COVID-19 relief grants would help students recover lost learning.
City Manager John Salomone has proposed a school budget total of $86.3 million, a $2.1 million or 2.5% increase over this year’s total. But it is $1.2 million short of the 3.95% increase requested by school officials.
Superintendent Kristen Stringfellow said several key items cause the budget jump, including salaries, a $379,544 increase; tuition, up 7.6%; health insurance, up by $271,000, and transportation, up by nearly $100,000.
The only new staff are a transportation/safety coordinator and grant-funded education equity coordinator and reading and math teachers.
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A report by a retired Connecticut police detective finds 94 students, who were attending Norwich Public Schools illegally because they did not live in the area, have been removed from school.
Ed Peckham, who joined the district as the new attendance officer in 2019, was hired by the school district to find out-of-town students. A report he released in November estimated those students cost the district $2.7 million, or 3% of the budget for the previous school year.
Peckham told the Norwich Bulletin that he found students living in Willimantic, Mystic and New London after staking out parents and following their commute to school. He said some parents who live outside the district want to send their children to Norwich schools to access special education programs. Others come from small districts in eastern Connecticut with just one high school, and they look to Norwich for more educational opportunities.
That amounts to 3 percent of the $83.3 million that was spent on Norwich schools last year.
A total of 94 students were identified as non-residents through a new program that was launched a year ago with the hiring of Ed Peckham, a retired Norwich police detective. “Once I started looking into it, I found a ton of them and I thought it would slow down, once I got the initial ones that had never been checked on, but it seems to be staying pretty constant,” Peckham told the Bulletin in an interview in early December.
In fact, since the date of his annual report, Nov. 11 of this year, Peckham has found additional cases yielding $110,000 more in savings. The estimated savings is based on the per-pupil cost of education and is for only one year. The actual cost to the district is likely higher than the official estimates given that some students may have been attending for more than a year and could have continued doing so had they not been caught, according to Peckham.