Local Elementary School Enrollment
Driving the decision to consolidate the elementary schools in town is the enrollment data projection in this slide taken from the Public Information Session Presentation.
It doesn’t seem economically feasible to have classroom and staff coverage for over 800 students with less than 500.
Based on costs of employment and benefits alone, cutting duplicate staffing for janitorial, cafeteria, office staffing, aide staff and even teaching staff would result in savings of more than $66,000. Those numbers only cut half positions. If they are part-time positions now then that makes sense. If they are full time, why bring them into the consolidated school at all? Personnel costs are the highest part of all education budgets and and I believe they are mostly out of the control of Selectmen or Boards of Finance.
If Antolini has 26 classrooms and New Hartford Elementary has 11 and we eliminate 3 classroom spaces in each school for art, music and media, that leaves 31 classrooms. At 500 students (we have only 468 and are projected to keep dropping) that leaves an average of less than 17 students per class. That’s pretty simple math. If it’s more complicated, maybe somebody can explain it.
newhartfordbeacon.com 
Need to also account for classrooms for special education student but even if two classrooms in each school were designated for this purpose, the class size is still manageable and within the size as mandated by the teacher’s contract.
I think a big question the BOE and Superintendent needs to ask is why are people sending their children to other schools outside of our public school system? Whether it be a CREC magnet school, parochial school, montessori school, home school, or some other private school…Why??? If these families where pleased with the local public school, they would send their children to the local school and perhaps, we wouldn’t be in such a predicament.
I wonder – they must have numbers on how many children are in town who choose to go to other schools. That would be interesting.