Capital budget 8/29
Just a quickie... current year capital budget passed 6-3. Orsini, Ruocco, Schrumm opposed. Their reasons varied. My main concern was the smartboards being included at $275k. I thought they should have been included at $350k so that they would go to referendum.
5-yr capital budget passed 6-3. Orsini, Ruocco, Schrumm opposed. Again, their reasons varied. My main thought on the five-year plan is that we're not actually spending any money.
Tim White
Town Council, Budget Committee
TimWhite98@yahoo.com
7 comments:
I really think that you should have voted to have the smartboards go to referendum for $350,000. This issue is of real interest to the public and they should have had an opportunity to cast their votes. By not voting to make it an referundum issue, the town councilors who voted for the passage of the budget made a shortcut to bypass the voters of Cheshire.
I agree...when people see the amount requested vs what amount needs to go to the people for a vote...it smells
To add any additional boards from the capital budget they will have to go to referundum. People forget that in the last two years Mr. Schrumm decided to add money for open space just under the referundum limit so it did not have to be voted on. It is his pet project. Thing like this happen all the time!
I also agree that the Smartboards should have gone to referendum. The money was reduced out of the boe budget and the public was told that amount would be decided at a referendum. To me the council just increased the boe budget by the 275K and the public had nothing to say about it. Will the superintendent use it all for Smartboards or exactly how will he decide to spend it?? Will the public even know how it's spent by the boe??
And to anon. 3:43....I'll save Tim the trouble and say that you should not be making specific comments about any certain council person or any other person for that matter.
anon 12:39pm... I certainly didn’t want to bypass the voters. As I said during the meeting, my preference would have been to increase the smartboards to $350k and send it to the voters. That would have been the best thing to do. But on the whole, I was ok with the capital budget. So I compromised.
anon 3:43pm... you are correct. The capital budget from two years ago included $250k for open space. It was adopted unanimously, I believe. I wanted to increase the number to $350k to send it to referendum, but the Council members with whom I spoke did not agree. Ultimately though, I decided that on the whole the budget was ok and voted for it. It was a compromise that I was not really happy about it, but I was ok with it.
During the BOE budget process I was opposed to having the Smartboards as part of an operating budget, it made no sense financially and legally. Operating dollars are operatinf and capital dollars are capital. i pushed to move this into capital dollars.
With that said the process was left to do its' thing, given the makeup of the members. What is important is the process was allowed to work and dollars were not needlessly spent in the BOE operating budget.
I would have preferred that the entire 1.5 mil go to referendum that allowed the money to be spent on a yealy basis, if the need was there. What we have now is the BOE has 25 Smartboards, will buy another 55 and come back and say it is a good idea.
Where is the testing methodology, criteria, for a Smartboard Pilotprogram, what defines paaa/fail? If we are to believe the Supt. the outcome is a good idea. There is no vehicle for non-partisan pass/fail.
There has not been an established criteria to determine the value or retrn on investment of the Smartboards. The Supt, said test scores are one way. I think the education dept owes the public other methods and criteria to determine if
Smartboards are a real value.
Tonight I had a chance to watch the TC meeting from 8-29 where they voted on the capital budget. The super said we now have 20-25 smartboards in the schools. Doesn't he have an exact number? He also mentioned the increase in test scores, although if you read the Waterbury paper from 8-30 it says Cheshire's SAT scores for the graduating class dropped 6 points on average in both the verbal and math as compared to the previous year's class. Again, his reasoning doesn't make sense. I hope there's full accountability on exactly how this $275,000 is spent. Now wouldn't that be a change of pace.
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