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Iino: Facing the Schools Quandary

This evening, on Thursday, Feb. 8, and again on Wednesday, Feb. 21, Regional School District (RSD) 17 will hold public forums to discuss a proposal for restructuring the schools to enhance education and reduce costs.

The proposed plan would reconfigure the Haddam and Killingworth elementary schools as K-3 primary schools: one of the Haddam elementary schools would close, leaving each town with one primary school. The existing HK Middle School building would house both a new intermediate school program for grades 4 and 5 and an expanded middle school program for grades 6, 7, and 8. HK High School would be unchanged.

RSD 17, which serves Haddam and Killingworth, has been in a quandary: Our school population has been falling for almost 10 years, yet our costs keep rising. We are proud of the quality of our schools and want to preserve it, but the school budget makes up almost 80 percent of town spending, and these increases have a heavy impact on our taxes.

The RSD 17 Board of Education established the Strategic Capital Planning Committee to address this situation. That committee examined a variety of school configurations and proposed the scenario described above as a way of reducing costs, improving the RSD 17 educational program, and fully using the district’s best assets.

According to Superintendent of Schools Howard Thiery, grouping grades as proposed would be a good match for the students’ instructional and developmental needs. He says that at 4th grade, curriculum and instruction begins to differentiate significantly from K-3, while 5th grade is more similar, instructionally, to 4th grade than to grades 6 to 8. He sees this proposed plan as a step forward for RSD 17 education.

In its initial consideration of alternative scenarios, the Planning Committee estimated that the proposed plan could produce annual savings of close to $1 million. “We made that extremely rough estimate for the sake of comparison,” says Suzanne Sack, who chairs the Strategic Capital Planning Committee. “We won’t have a firm number until we actually fill in the details of the plan, but further analysis gives us confidence that we could achieve savings in that range.”

The RSD 17 Board of Education plans to reach a decision in March on whether and how to implement the proposed plan.

The forum tonight, Thursday, Feb. 8, will be held at Haddam Killingworth Middle School, 451 Route 81, Killingworth, at 7 p.m. Another will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 21, at Haddam Killingworth High School, 95 Little City Road, Higganum, at 6 p.m. The Board of Education invites everyone in the community to come learn about and discuss the proposal. If you can’t come, the meetings will be televised at www.esenetworks.com/live-events.aspx?id= 52131. Further information is available at rsd17.org.