Tight Budgets Hurting Student Art Programs, Tolland Teachers Say

The board of education could offer little more than sympathy and moral support to the school district’s few remaining art teachers who appeared before the board Wednesday evening to give first-hand accounts about the effect tight budgets have had on their programs and students.

“I’m overwhelmed with the numbers I have,” said Janice Bacewicz , the only art teacher left at Birch Grove Primary School that serves children in kindergarten through Grade 2. “I have 663 students.”

With that number, it’s virtually impossible to give them any individualized attention, said Bacewicz who was one of four finalists for Connecticut Teacher of the Year in 2003. “We are not teaching,” she said.

Bacewicz had gone to the meeting to help the district’s director of curriculum and instruction, Kathryn Eidson, explain what the school system has lost during in the last two budget cycles in which a flat funding two years ago was followed by a 1 percent increase last year.

“The art curriculum has been dramatically reduced,” Eidson told the board members.

Superintendent of Schools William Guzman said the district lost 22 teaching positions last year because of insufficient funding. The tight budget has been “devastating at all levels,” Guzman said.

Eidson told the board the district is now down to one art teacher at Birch Grove, Tolland Intermediate School, and at the middle and three at Tolland High School. At the board’s previous meeting on March 23, Eidson outlined similar staffing problems in the world language curriculum where there are not enough teachers on staff to handle the interest shown by students in French.

Based on the public’s unwillingness to approve the school board’s overall budget proposals for the current and previous fiscal years, board member Diane Clokey said she had doubts about residents support for the arts in education.

“I question how we value art in Tolland,” Clokey said.

Board member Robert (Andy) Powell, however, said board members have a “bigger problem” confronting them, and that is determining “the value of education” overall to town taxpayers.

Several times during the meeting, board members and school administrators’ frustrations surfaced over town taxpayers’ refusal to support the district’s budget requests more fully.

Guzman asked how the district can, with a 1 percent budget increase, continue to deliver a “quality education to children.”

With the town council set to present its version of next year’s school budget to the public on April 26, school board Chairman Robert Pagoni appears worried that the political forces that held local school spending in check the past two years could do so again to next year’s $35.13 million school budget proposal which reflects a 3.93 percent increase in spending.

“Nobody liked this,” Pagoni said of the program and personnel cuts brought on by two tight budgets. But "we can’t fix what the public won’t support.”

Pagoni’s said residents’ lack of support for the schools budget in the past two years was “pathetic.”

“I am ashamed of some of the people in this community,” he said.