One-on-One with: Dr. Joseph Connelly
Published on February 28th, 2007
STONEHAM, MA - After an up-and-down tenure as the Stoneham Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Joseph Connelly has already announced his retirement and is currently staying on as a consultant to the Stoneham school system while the town searches for a replacement - a candidate they hope to have in place by early April. Connelly sat down for a candid Q&A that we'll publish in two parts, with the first part running this week.
SI: Where are the schools headed as you leave the Superintendent's office?
Connelly: We've put an awful lot of time on the budget and we have an itemized expense on what everything is going to cost next year. Although we call it a Draft One budget, it's not a start-off budget where you ask for the sky and expect for it to be cut down a bit. It's a bare bones budget, which is what we need to maintain our existing services. It's the same refrain as last year, but it remains true. I give them the guidelines and they spend October and November going over the needs. Between November and Christmas we have some difficult budget sessions, and we've already made compromised before we even get to the first budget. For the first time, the School Committee was a part of that process and were involved in the grassroots stage to decide what basic needs for the school kids were and what the compromises are that the budget makers have been making for years. It's no help to anyone to ask for another $2 million or a 10 percent budget increase when the money simply isn't there...it puts everyone in a stressful situation, because once you put a budget together that the budget holders have an anticipation of what they're going to get, and they feel like they've lost something they were never going to have if they don't get it. I try to be realistic about our budget requests and that worked really well in the first six or seven years I was here when the budget was good.
In recent years, your Draft One is a barebones basic budget and we've gone dramatically below that. I've trade to make cuts as realistic as possible to give people an idea of what they're going to have. This budget includes the barebones budget but it also includes some restoration money after five years of budget cuts. At some point we have to restore things that we've lost.
The first thing is to restore some of the middle school programs because they've taken the biggest hit - including some lost programs and four lost teachers including business education, family consumer science technology teacher, and a health teacher that will also us to go back to the team concept and also add four subjects that are vital to students at a critical age of their development. A middle school education without classes like technology, keyboarding and health really staggers the imagination. If you don't put it on the table, then it's "Out of Sight, Out of Mind". If this isn't the year to restore then it's at the forefront going forward by putting it in the budget.
Special Ed is something that increases at an incredible rate and it's something that's completely out of our control. We can't continue to increase spending at the expense of all our other students - we're taking money for special ed and taking it away from regular ed. We've built a $150,000 for contingency special ed costs that come in every year, and this year we're looking at a $164,000 deficit for sped. Unlike any other school system that builds on developing sped cost, we haven't done that. We've only budgeted for SPED costs that we know we have and it doesn't account for new students moving in or changes in SPED services. It doesn't work anymore, because the Finance Committee doesn't have a reserve fund when we go to them with unanticipated costs.
We've also built in two spots for special ed teachers to accommodate a changing special ed population that's rising with a whole new set of special education needs - different than even five or ten years ago. You want to constantly be building new programs to meet the kids' needs in the least restrictive environment, which is the public school setting.
There is something happening with the autism spectrum. We have a very, very large and changing autism population with growing numbers in autism spectrum services and Asperger's Autism. We also have a developing need for kids that need psychiatric and psychological intervention for kids that are going through severe mental and emotional stress in their lives. It's happening not just at the high school, but at all levels of the school system. These kids need specialized psychological support system for kids that we never needed before. What's causing it? I don't know, but everyone is talking about this at the statewide level.
Having said all that, we've included funding for a pair of positions that can create new programs to deal with the growing need for services for autistic kids and those with psychological needs.
You're talking about six positions and health insurance for positions that we really need and you're talking about $40,000 times six which is a quarter of a million dollars and then you add health insurance costs and you have yourself $300,000 or $400,000 in additional costs because of special ed needs as well as restoring Middle Schools. Will this survive the budget process? Clearly it won't unless there's an adjustment in the budget process and new revenue sources aren't found...an override, new projects coming to Stoneham or a change to the Chap. 70 formula but as of right new all of these things have stalled and we can't count on any of these funds going forward.
We hope to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, side-by-side with the town in presenting the budget, and we're purposefully getting together and presenting our budgets together. Arlington has controlled their health care costs and they've developed a five-year plan, so they put plan together that they're assuring the community that if you go for an override it will be only a one-time adjustment and something that won't be needed again for many, many years.
SI: How important is it for the Municipal and schools to present these budgets shoulder-to-shoulder?
Connelly: I think it's all right to disagree but I don't think it's all right to not work together. We can have different solutions to the problem, but we have to work together and share ideas and resources to be effective. In the next two or three months, I think you'll see that we're all working together for a common goal in bettering the town and quite frankly I think that's always been the case in the past - despite what the perception might be out there. There has been little of that. Maybe we've disagreed in strategies, but there's not a school committee budget that we've started without saying that the town has given the schools every penny that they possibly could. The culprit here is that the town doesn't have the revenue to support the services that the Town of Stoneham should have, and that's not the School Committee's fault, that's not the Selectmen's fault, and that's not the Finance Committee's fault. That's what we're working on now to get that financial adjustment that's long overdue in Stoneham.
SI: What are some of the things that will be affected if there isn't an override?
Connelly: The outgoing TA has asked us to put together a zero increase budget, but in this day and age to survive on a budget with yearly increases it's a cut budget rather than a level-funded budget. To meet the TA's request, we have to develop a budget that gets by next year with no dollar increase, which means reducing $1.5-2 million in services. As difficult as it was five years ago, it's even more difficult now because we don't have that layer of 65-70 employees that we laid off over the last five years. We can't lay off any high school staff and from the exit interviews for high school accreditation we know that they've found some deficiencies that are financially driven because of staffing issues and that's something we can't cut from and need to address. We have time on learning mandates and we have just enough staff to keep 866 students fully engaged for 990 hours a year...study halls don't count as minutes of learning and we can't do that anymore. Middle School has been decimated already, so you're getting down to school closings and closing down wings. You're getting into relocating kids to other schools and potentially relocations to schools that weren't meant to hold kids of their age group. That will be the zero increase budget, we have the Draft One budget and then hopefully we'll have something compromised in between. We want to put it together with a list of consequences or actions for each budget, and what we're trying to stay away from is hassling for two months over cuts and be accused of scare tactics.
SI: What you know about the new TA, David Ragucci?
Connelly: I haven't previously worked with him, but what I've read about him presents a portrait of a person with a certain skill set that could really benefit the Town of Stoneham - so that's encouraging. I'm excited to work with him and stand ready to assist him in any way we can.
SI: What's your plan for the next year or two?
Connelly: I'm helping in Stoneham till June and so far I haven't missed a day because it's so demanding. I can only work so many days because of retirement rules, and I would say that hopefully we can make a smooth transition. The School Committee has done a wonderful job of searching for a replacement and we're currently underway with the search committee for the whole process and interview dictates. Preliminary interviews are currently underway and we're hoping to have someone in place by early April so they can inform their school system and attend School Committee meetings and transition with me to get up to speed with the complicated process. We want a smooth transition with no learning curve.
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