Three subgroups have been formed
By Colleen Gundlach

Four subcommittees have been formed by the Norfolk-Colebrook Regional Study Committee (RSC) to begin the formal evaluation of a proposed consolidation of the Norfolk and Colebrook school systems. The Education and Community, Facilities and Transportation, and Governance and Legal subcommittees have been meeting to plan how they intend to shape this proposal. The fourth committee, Budgets and Fiscal, will hold off making recommendations until the first three have completed some initial work on their outlines.
The Education and Community subcommittee will be taking the lead on informing the public as discussions at the RSC progress. Volunteers are being sought to serve on all subcommittees.
The Facilities and Transportation group will be trying to strike a balance between readying Botelle for a large influx of students while understanding that, if student enrollment continues to decline in either town, some physical changes at the school may be temporary. “The dialogue that Norfolk Now is moving to the forefront of people’s minds is what we want Norfolk to be in 2023,” says Norfolk Board of Education Chairman EJay Lockwood. “I take that a couple of steps further, and ask whether some of those ideas can reverse the soft market for housing, especially with home buyers with younger children; and then secondly how can a regional elementary school be part of the package to help achieve those goals.”
A new school board would need to be constructed if a merger of the elementary schools becomes a reality. This task is the responsibility of the Governance and Legal subcommittee. It’s members will determine how to shift existing contracts to the new board of education and perhaps most importantly, will need to develop a plan acceptable to both towns for sharing any identified savings resulting from a merger in a manner acceptable to both towns.
After these three subcommittees have finished their evaluations, they will provide guidance to the Budgets and Fiscal group, which will, at a minimum, construct a detailed five year plan for the proposed new school system.
The RSC as a whole meets once a month, and Education Connection in Litchfield has been hired as a consultant, at a cost of roughly $30,000. The state and the two towns will split this cost evenly.
It is the RSC’s primary goal to improve the education received by the students of Norfolk and Colebrook, and to look for any efficiencies that can be gained by the merger of the two schools, with the intention of either returning any savings realized back to the taxpayers through budget reductions, by investing those savings into new educational programs, or some mix of the two.
Norfolk currently spends more per child each year than Colebrook, according to Lockwood. “That is not necessarily a bad thing,” he says. “People looking to move to a new town often look at the cost per pupil ratio as an indication of school quality, but we also don’t want our per pupil costs to be high simply because we are educating less students for the same amount of money. We need to make sure that we are spending money in a way that enhances the educational experience of the kids beyond the standard ‘must haves’.”
In the budget for the school year just closed, the two widest differences between the schools were in the areas of Special Education and Building Operations/Maintenance, where Norfolk spent two times as much as Colebrook. Another sizable difference between the two budgets is in the area of non-certified personnel. Norfolk offers medical and dental benefits to full-time employees who are not teachers. Colebrook does not offer such benefits to its non-certified staff.
Lockwood says that, while there is much work to be done, an aggressive timeline would have the merger, should it be approved, potentially taking place in time for the 2014-15 school year.
Residents interested in volunteering for one of the subcommittees should contact RSC Chairman Jeanne Jones, Vice Chairman Sally Carr, Secretary Susan Dyer or Treasurer Jim Millar. The next meeting of the RSC is scheduled for September 5 at 7 p.m. at Botelle School.