In Connecticut: "Cutting to the Bone"

By Christopher Byron

It is a muggy Tuesday evening, and in the crowded gymnasium of a suburban Connecticut high school 60 miles from Manhattan, Reaganomics has come home to roost. Welcome to Weston's annual town meeting, a 200-year-old form of democratic self-rule that once was as common in New England as the American elm, and now is becoming increasingly rare.

Wealthy and Republican to the foundations of their $350,000 clapboard colonials, Weston's voters gave an overwhelming 72% majority to Ronald Reagan and his economic policy of cut and slash. Now the small town (pop. 9,000) is up against a little painful cutting of its own.

The issue at hand: whether to raise local property taxes or cut Weston's $7 million school budget by $400,000 for the 1981-82 school year. With indirect federal subsidies suddenly imperiled, the town cannot decide whether to spend less in the future or tax itself more. "We must face economic realities," intones Budget Basher John Lupton, a silver-haired onetime advertising executive remotely related to Puritan Spoilsport Cotton Mather. But Lupton is having trouble convincing his neighbors that his newly formed antiwaste group, COST (Coalition Opposing Soaring Taxes) is not antieducation.

Education is Weston's main pride and principal industry--in fact, its only industry. Declares Westonite Businessman and Parent David Purvis: "We moved to Weston because it had a serious school system. I am willing to spend what it takes to keep it that way." IBM Executive Robert Williams calculates that raising taxes will cost a mere 550 per citizen per day. He wonders if "we should risk our educational system" for such a paltry sum.

A board of education member explains that the proposed spending cut would force the firing of 25% of the teaching staff, the scrapping of all electives, the ballooning of the town's enviable 14-to-l ratio of students to teachers--in short, the end to "quality education" in Weston.

Just as Pentagon analysts tend to judge military power by the rise of defense spending, Weston's parents have learned to equate quality education with regular yearly jumps in the school budget. There has never been much real pressure to hold spending in check, and budgets have ballooned accordingly. In 1980 per-pupil expenditure for operations and amortization exceeded $3,600 for the town's 1,922 schoolchildren, placing Weston in the ranks of educationally elite suburbs like Winnetka, Ill., whose New Trier East High School is widely looked upon as the best public secondary school in the country.

Much of Weston's school budget money has been spent putting together, and steadily enriching, a curriculum that many a small college would be proud to call its own. During the 1981-82 school year, Weston's 750 or so high school students will be able to pick and choose from among 31 different English courses, 20 courses in mathematics, 27 different foreign and ancient language offerings, and a delicatessen of diverting electives ranging -- from interior design, film and the principles of collage and batik to something called "Advanced Foods."

Yet there is precious little evidence that Weston's schools are cranking out better and better students each year. As with public schools everywhere, the growth in electives has meant less time for core academics. One rough sign of the decline is weakening performance on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which colleges often use to help evaluate an applicant's real academic promise. Nationwide, scores have slipped gently but steadily in recent years, and Weston has been no exception, with test results now averaging in a distinctly mediocre 450 to 480 range. Though most seniors go on to college anyway, many do so because parents have little trouble paying the bills.

Weston now has 21% fewer students than it did seven years ago, but the teaching staff has dropped by less than half that much. Meanwhile, the population has aged, and more than 50% of the town's residents are now beyond 55 years of age and no longer have children in the schools.

COST members are riled most by what they regard as educational frills and extras in the budget, which the board of education insists has already been "cut to the bone." Among the budget items that rankle most: $23,000 for art-instruction supplies, $13,000 for a gymnasium divider net, $3,600 for a color TV and video taping system.

Many COST parents are upset by the Craig Claiborne atmosphere in the home ec program. Under "equipment replacement," next year's budget lists $2,650 for such things as self-cleaning ovens and a microwave unit. "Microwave cooking is a new kitchen technology," argues one defender of the space-age gadget. Adds another: "With microwave ovens, the kids can cook up a meal and eat it, all in the same period.'1 "Phooey," sneers a middle-aged widow and mother of three. "The parents in this town just want high-priced baby-sitting systems for their children."

Much of the townsfolk's rancor is aimed at the school system's superintendent, Thomas Aquila, already one of the highest paid in the state. At $56,000, he makes more than the Governor of Connecticut. "We don't have quality education," complains Lupton. "What we have is spending gone berserk."

For three nights in a row, Weston's townspeople--housewives and commuters, doctors and architects, retired businessmen and young divorcees--wrestle with the dilemma, and by then it is clear that for many of them, "quality education" is really just a code phrase for a far more mercantile concept: the propping up of Weston's sky-high property values.

Many corporations, after fleeing the chaos and decay of New York City, have relocated around Weston, in Connecticut's Fairfield County, which now boasts more FORTUNE 500 company headquarters than anywhere else in the country except New York City itself.

With whole armies of executives now being transferred in and out almost daily by their employers, the real estate market has been kept churning, and resale values for homes have shot into orbit. In Weston, a three-or four-bedroom ranch that might have sold new in 1970 for $50,000 would today be snapped up almost immediately for $200,000.

As the meetings drag on, property values come up again and again. A former board of education chairman rises to lament that without "quality schools" only a rich Arab with a harem would want to buy his oversized colonial; a marketing vice president for Smith Corona asserts that home values are directly tied to school quality, and urges the town not to "take a meat ax to the best asset the town has."

In the end, some enervating procedural wrangles lead to a compromise cut of $100,000, which really means property values and profligate pedagogy pretty much as usual in Weston. "It's a drop in the bucket," says Board of Finance Member Karl Nelson. "The board of ed can cover that cut just out of its contingency funds, and nothing will change." Nor will it, apparently, until the townspeople either run out of tax money or decide to take a long, hard look at their school system.

As Ronald Reagan is learning to his chagrin in Washington, calling for cutbacks is one thing; delivering on them is something else again.

--By Christopher Byron

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