Magnet Schools Costing City
By Chris Seymour | Correspondent at March 5, 2024 | 6:15 pm | Print
This school year, there are 458 New Britain students attending 24 different magnet schools in the area, costing the Consolidated School District of New Britain $2,152,565.
According to BOE President Sharon Beloin-Saavedra, the state gave the magnet schools $10,443 per child attending their institution for fiscal year 2013-14, and the local school system pays the remaining balance. “The balance is paid by us and that can be as low as $3,330 or as high as $5,400 per child,” she explained, noting the balance varies by school but averages $4,725 per child.
The number of city students attending magnet schools has jumped 110 children from 348 in 2013-14 to 458 this year and the cost to the BOE has increased $623,167 year to year (from $1,529,398 in 2013-14).
\The BOE has no control over how many kids attend magnet schools, and the number of city kids that will attend a magnet school is unknown to the BOE while it is planning for the coming fiscal year, Beloin-Saavedra pointed out.
“We will adopt a budget for next year not knowing how many New Britain kids will go to a CREC [Capitol Region Education Council, which runs many Hartford-area magnet schools] school,” she said. “But the families on their own apply for a magnet school through CREC and if they get in, CREC will notify us and send us a bill, and then we have to verify that they are New Britain residents so we aren’t paying for kids who don’t live here.”
While she believes that the magnet schools provide students with a great education, Beloin-Saavedra said she feels that the magnet schools and local school systems operate under two completely different sets of rules that seem to favor magnet schools—since the magnets (unlike local school systems) can attempt to recruit a local district’s best and brightest students through methods such as direct mailings and commercials.
“It just doesn’t seem like these systems are set up to complement each other,” she said. “It seems like it is set up for competition and not fair competition because we feel like we are in a race with either our legs tied together or our hands tied behind our back; we are at a disadvantage in this competition.”
In addition to targeting prospective students, magnet schools also go after local districts’ staff, according to Beloin-Saavedra. “Traditional public schools operate under a different set of rules than the magnet schools do and the magnet schools get to use their money to recruit students and staff using media sources [such as TV and radio commercials and direct mailings]; we don’t do that—we spend our money on our kids, not on trying to recruit kids,” she said.
The number of magnet schools in the Hartford area has increased in recent years as the state attempts to satisfy the settlement of the Sheff Vs. O’Neill case; in that case, in 1996, the State Supreme Court ruled that the racial and socioeconomic isolation of Hartford school children violated the state constitution, but set no goal, remedy, or timetable to resolve the problem, according to sheffmovement.org.
One of the remedies that ultimately emerged to help meet the lawsuit settlement was greater use of magnet schools in the region. Interestingly, Beloin-Saavedra noted that an urban community like New Britain is considered a “suburb” of Hartford, in terms of the Sheff settlement.
Ultimately, Beloin-Saavedra feels that the state can’t have it both ways and needs to decide how it wants to approach school districts in the interest of being equitable to all.
“I do think that the state needs to decide, are we going to run regional educational school systems? Or are we going to have traditional [districts] because if you keep setting up multiple school systems that compete against each other for the same small pot of money, it’s always leaving someone behind,” she detailed.
“And it’s usually your local, traditional public school system that’s left behind because kids opt into magnet schools, charter schools and private schools—and all of those systems can exit a child; a public school system cannot exit a child,” she added. “A traditional public school system takes everybody whatever your issue is.”
The BOE President said she has an answer for all of this: making housing affordable in every community.
“And then we wouldn’t be talking about bussing kids across lines or people who live in one town thinking that another town’s school system is better,” observed Beloin-Saavedra. “Equalize or regionalize housing and then go ahead and regionalize your school systems if you want but it just seems crazy that we are crisscrossing and zigzagging kids all over the state ; it’s a patchwork approach to the bigger problem of the haves and the have nots.”
