A Conversation With Superintendent Mary Beth Iacobelli

 

With the effort to consolidate the Norfolk and Colebrook primary schools defeated, Norfolk Now’s Wiley Wood visited Superintendent Mary Beth Iacobelli for a discussion of the present and future of Botelle School. The following interview has been edited and condensed.

 

NN: So Botelle School continues on.

 

MBI: It’s a wonderful, wonderful school. It’s a great community. And it doesn’t appear that there will be a consolidation anytime in the very near future, so it makes it a little easier to move forward and plan.

 

NN: It’s a relief, then, to have the consolidation effort behind you.

 

MBI: Well, in one way it’s a relief, in terms of planning. We’ve decided that we need a resource room. Right now our various resources are spread around the building. We have hundreds of level books, books that discuss a topic at a given reading level, and manipulatives, things to enrich and enhance various topics. We need to put them all into one area and catalogue them so we know where things are when teachers need them. Teachers will sign materials out. Getting teaching aids together won’t be such a treasure hunt.

During the past year, we held off on the project because we thought, if we set up a whole room like that and consolidation goes through and that room becomes a classroom, then we will have to dismantle it and move things again. So now we can move forward on that project.

 

NN: And a resource room is something you wouldn’t be able to have if another hundred kids were coming into the building. So that’s an advantage.

 

MBI: Correct. But there are some disadvantages. As a matter of fact, a group of small-school superintendents are getting together in early December to look at solutions. The issue we’re all dealing with is maintaining high-quality educational programming in an era of rising costs and declining enrollment.

We have to start looking at non-traditional models for accommodating kids—combined classes, ungraded progressive classrooms—because not too far down the road it’s likely that we won’t be able to afford the luxury of having one classroom teacher for every grade level.

In Norfolk, in Colebrook, in Barkhamsted, with just 12 kids, 10 kids, 8 kids in a classroom, at what point do we say, we can’t afford a teacher for every grade level if the class size is so small.

 

NN: I was just looking at the enrollment projections, and it looks as though you have a few years before enrollment becomes an issue.

 

MBI: Botelle’s enrollment is running higher than predicted. We actually have a few more students than we had a couple years ago when I arrived. We’ve maintained pretty consistent numbers and the pipeline is such that we will maintain an average class size of about 14 for a while. On the other hand Colebrook is declining at a more rapid rate than predicted.

 

NN: So when you talk about combining classes, you’re looking pretty far down the road.

 

MBI: Yes, but I believe that if you don’t plan for the future, you don’t have a future. We don’t want to wait until we get there to have some sense of how we might respond.

 

NN: Under what conditions would you support another regionalization effort?

 

MBI: Here at school we’ve been looking at ways to collaborate with Colebrook. Last year I introduced the Kids’ Literature Quiz to Norfolk. We participated, and this year Colebrook will participate too. So we’ll work with Colebrook students in preparation for the regional competition this spring.

We will also revisit the possibility of joining together to do the Nature’s Classroom trip for sixth grade students. The sixth grade group takes a trip for a week, they go on whale watches, they explore marshes, they do some fascinating things that you cannot do in Norfolk. We try to broaden their horizons a bit.

Since it’s a trip that students from both towns make every year, it might be another way that we can start to build relationships. I think if our students and our families and our boards can develop some working relationships, perhaps the next time we sit down at the table to see how we can actually work together as a school district, perhaps it might be a little bit more successful.

 

NN: Let’s talk about rising costs. Teachers’ salaries tend to go up.

 

MBI: Although there’s understandably some public pushback. Many people have taken pay cuts or pay freezes over the last several years, and people have lost their jobs due to the recession. There is resentment that teachers automatically get raises, whether they do a great job or not so great a job.

We negotiate for contracts with the teachers’ unions every three years or so, and we know going in what the trend is and what cases have gone to arbitration. Last year when we negotiated for a three-year contract, we knew salaries had to increase more than 2.5 percent, but they could be under 3.5 percent. That was the average pay raise for teachers across the state. If we didn’t settle contract negotiations in that ballpark and it went to arbitration, the town would lose, and it could be that it would have to pay even more. So that is a cost that is going to continue to go up. We really don’t have any leverage to slow that down or to impact that in any way. And at the end of the day, salary and benefits are the largest chunk of our budget.

 

NN: It’s hard to see how any collaboration with Colebrook short of full consolidation is going to reduce costs significantly.

 

MBI: You still have two buildings, and you still have two staffs. Most of our special area teachers are already shared. We have a two-and-a-half-day gym person, who also works elsewhere in the district. We share an art teacher. Our music teachers are part-time. All of our special-area teachers are part-time. And most of them make themselves whole because they work either in Colebrook or Barkhamsted on those alternate days.

One of the nice things about the staffing situation had we consolidated with Colebrook is that we could use teachers’ time more efficiently. Many of the teachers already toggle between the two buildings and know all the students, but it would save them the trip, make for a seamless transition.

 

NN: Let’s talk about some of the special-use rooms. You have a dedicated science room?

 

MBI: There is a science room, and it does give us the opportunity, especially the upper grades, if they want to set up a lab, the teachers can go in ahead of time and set that lab up and then students can come in and they can have extended time. They can leave it, come back the next day, as opposed to breaking down your classroom and bringing out all of these beakers or microscopes.

 

NN: Are there other dedicated rooms that were saved when consolidation fell through?

 

MBI: Well, there was some concern that we would lose our art room. I’m not sure that would have happened, because there’s some language that went with the funding of that art room that would prevent it from being used for other purposes.

 

The other space that will be saved is we have a speech and language therapist, we have a school psychologist, we have a social worker, we have several para-professionals, who right now have good-quality instructional spaces where they can bring their students. They have a little desk, a little office space. If we were to consolidate, we would lose those big spaces. We would be looking at little areas that were partitioned and we’d be sacrificing some confidentiality, some privacy. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world for most of us, but for the people who lost their space it would be a little bit more traumatic.

 

NN: Would you say Botelle is an attractive prospect to someone moving into the area to raise children?

 

MBI: For all intents and purposes this is a private school. You’d be hard pressed to find this kind of environment elsewhere. We have very qualified teachers, we are not lacking for resources, we have a wonderful computer lab. And we now have 40 iPads that are used on a regular basis in our classrooms. We’ve got SmartBoards in every classroom. We’ve got wonderful technology. The low class size in just enviable. We have five para-professionals who support our curriculum implementation so that students who are struggling get additional support. We’re looking to expand our gifted and talented program. We’re doing Kids’ Lit Quiz. And we have a full-time curriculum resource teacher to support those things. So it is wonderful, and Norfolk is a blessed community to have this kind of school.

I think that was part of the angst some people felt in Norfolk, that Botelle is so good, it’s working really well, we just don’t want to mess with what we’ve got.

But it’s a phenomenal opportunity for families, if you can afford to move here, and if you can deal with driving to the next town for a quart of milk. You couldn’t ask for a better situation.

 

NN: Costs might be going up, but the State in any case prevents school budgets from going down.

 

MBI: Right, the Minimum Budget Requirement. So in the last several years we’ve received $2.5 million for our budget. The way the law was written, Norfolk would not be able to give Botelle a penny less than $2.5 million in the next budget. No matter what, whether we needed it or not.

The new law that was passed this summer takes into account the percentage of free and reduced lunch students and allows spending at a lower figure. When I did the calculations, I discovered that Norfolk could right off the bat give us about $30,000 less than what they gave us last year. So even though everything else is going up, and teachers are getting a three percent raise, and all the other personnel are getting a three percent raise and oil is going up and insurance has gone up, Norfolk could say: We’re going to give you $30,000 less than we gave you last year, figure it out. And we would have to do that.

So that will be the dance that we do. I’m optimistic in that Norfolk places a high value on education and the town governors are not going to do anything to compromise the quality of the education we’ve provided students in the past. But the new law around MBR gives them the right to do that.

 

NN: Is $30,000 a big number?

 

MBI: Well, in a $2.5 million budget, it is. It’s half a teacher, it’s a secretary, it’s one and a half para-professionals. It’s any number of things. It’s not insignificant.

When we have to make cuts, I look first at those line items that are furthest from teaching and learning. For example, last spring we had to reduce the budget by approximately $35,000 to get to a zero increase, and we cut cafeteria tables (they are about 20 years old and the folding mechanisms are beginning to malfunction), floor tiles in certain parts of the building (where they are beginning to crack and buckle), and wallpaper that is beginning to peel. These items will appear again in the coming budget because, while they do not yet pose a safety concern, at some point replacing them will not be optional.

 

NN: What about socialization? This is such a small school, and Regional #7 is a much bigger pond. How do the students from Norfolk do?

 

MBI: There’s no indication at all that Norfolk students have any problems whatsoever transitioning to Regional and they’ve been highly successful there.

I’ve heard from parents that it’s their job to bring about socialization. School should be about teaching kids, not socializing them. And to a degree, I won’t argue with that.

But the limitation here, being a small school, is having one class at each grade level. If you’ve got conflicts between kids, you can’t separate them. If you have a clash between a teacher and a student, you’ve got no option, that teacher’s the only game in town. Not that we have problems here with that, but it is nice to have some choice as you’re moving kids from grade to grade.

You might have a student who is quiet and who is intimidated by a teacher who is big and loud. Not that it’s the worst thing in the world, but if you’ve got the opportunity to put that student with a teacher who’s more soft-spoken, that child is not going to go home every day with a stomach-ache saying: That teacher yells all the time. The teacher’s not yelling, it’s just that they have different personalities. So you don’t have those options in a small school, and my worry is that those options are going to get even smaller for us.

The other thing is that most of the kids in Botelle come into preschool and 7 years later they graduate. So those little puppies are coming into preschool and they’re spending preschool, kindergarten 1^st 2^nd 3^rd with the same group of 10, 12, 13 kids, 15 kids maybe. After 2^nd grade they become more like siblings than classmates. It would be nice to be able to mix it up a little bit, because there’s not a lot of diversity in Norfolk. Again, it’s not the end of the world. It’s something it would be really nice to have, but it’s not a serious handicap that we don’t have it.

 

NN: You sound like an advocate for consolidation.

 

MBI: Botelle really is like a family environment. There’s good and there’s bad, but by and large, it’s a wonderful school, and we deal with the issues around small size.

And if we had had the consolidation, there would have been as many advantages as there would have been perceived disadvantages. You do have to grow with the times. Obviously the plan as it was presented was not the plan that Colebrook and Norfolk wanted, but I’ve got to believe that there’s some plan that people can agree on that’s good for kids, good for the communities. Because for Norfolk to spend $4.2 million to support two distinctive districts, I can understand why consolidation is something they looked at. With consolidation, you could reduce your baseline costs during year one. Eliminate one building that you’re paying for, eliminate one administrative staff.

 

NN: It sounds as though that argument didn’t figure very strongly in the thinking of Colebrook voters.

 

MBI: Well, they didn’t want to lose their school. That’s a tough one. And people were a little skeptical about whether it was going to put more money in their wallets. There were going to be cost savings without a doubt, but that money was going to buy a truck for the town, it was going to fix more roads. There wouldn’t be a reduction in taxes.

So there were a number of people who said, Well, I’m not really going to have more money at the end of my week, and I don’t want to lose my school, I don’t want to give up control or ownership of the school that we have.

 

NN: It was a much more irrevocable decision for Colebrook than it was for us in Norfolk. But the question might come up again if population trends go in the expected direction.

 

MBI: Yes, I can’t imagine that it won’t come up again. This may not have been the right time, and at some point in the future the effort may be more successful.

 

NN: And in the meantime, we have Botelle School.

 

MBI: It’s a jewel, it really is a treasure. And it’s a pleasure to come up here and be a part of it.

 

Photo by Bruce Frisch.