Fact-Checking the August 2026 Restructuring Proposal

The scorecard

The proposal's claims — and the questions it doesn't answer. Click any row to jump to the evidence.

Claim 1The "$568,000 recurring" saving — about half is one-time

"…a combined recurring reduction of approximately $568,000—while increasing the number of teachers serving our students…"— Proposal, page 1

What the record shows

• The math itself is fine. $807,972 in cuts and revenue, minus $299,225 in additions, equals the claimed $508,747 school-side reduction, plus $59,225 on the town side.
• But the biggest line is one-year-only. The superintendent's $260,228 is saved in 2026-27 alone — the proposal itself says: "Restore the Superintendent position in the 2027/2028 budget."
• A saving that ends after one year is not recurring.
• What actually recurs: roughly $308,000–$408,000 a year once contracts end in 2028 — about 0.6–0.8% of the proposed school budget.
• Why a range: the proposal is ambiguous on whether the $100,000 world-language teacher is a new cost ("no additional cost if already included in the current budget").

Claim 2"Fund Balance" pays the contracts — which account pays changes, the amount does not

"Use BOF supplemental appropriations from Fund Balance to cover contractual expenses related to D. Sullivan and J. Kuckel until those obligations expire."— Proposal, page 2

"It is important to note that these transfers are lower than the threshold required for a town meeting."— Proposal, page 4

What the record shows

• The contracts don't go away. Per the proposal itself: about $206,000/yr for the Assistant Superintendent (contract runs to June 2028) and up to $254,000 for the former superintendent (payable as late as October 2027).
• Taxpayers still pay — up to about $460,000 a year at the peak — just from the town's savings account instead of the school budget.
• Fund balance is taxpayer money too. It's the surplus left from taxes collected in past years — the town's cushion for emergencies and the credential behind its bond rating. Paying from it doesn't reduce what taxpayers pay; it moves the bill from this year's tax bill to savings those same taxpayers already built, and those transfers do not go before voters.
• The budget looks smaller; the town's total cost isn't, until 2028.
• Those reserves have been drawn down recently. The joint health-insurance reserve fell from $3.28 million to $684,000 in four years (details), and the defeated FY 26-27 budget included $3.2 million partly to rebuild it.
• No public vote. The proposal notes the transfers are sized below the threshold that requires a town meeting — so residents would not vote on them.

Claim 3"We ran without these jobs before" — accurate for one of the two jobs

"Despite serving substantially more students in the past, Colchester operated for many years without either an Assistant Superintendent or an Assistant Director of Pupil Services."— Proposal, page 4

What the record shows

• Assistant Superintendent: essentially right. The title dates to a special Board meeting on June 14, 2022 — and the FY 2022-23 budget book still lists the salary line as "Director of Teaching & Learning — Step 4 per union contract schedule." It was a re-title of an existing job, not a new one.
• The catch: because the function existed for decades under the old title, cutting the seat doesn't remove a "layer" — the work has to land somewhere (see Claim 5).
• Assistant Director of Pupil Services: wrong date. The proposal presents it as an addition under the last superintendent ("Additional senior positions followed…"). Board records show the district welcoming its Assistant Director in June 2021 — under Superintendent Burt, a year and a half before Sullivan arrived.

Claim 4"Comparable districts use directors" — most of the eleven districts checked do not

"Comparable Connecticut districts demonstrate that curriculum mandates can be managed through director-level positions rather than an Assistant Superintendent structure."— Proposal, page 5

What the record shows

• The proposal names no districts. We checked the current staff pages of eleven similar CT districts, favoring Colchester's state-assigned peer group (District Reference Group D — the CT State Department of Education's grouping of districts with similar demographics and income).
• 7 of the 9 DRG D peers have an Assistant Superintendent. One of them (Rocky Hill) has three.
• The 4 director-model districts are mostly smaller than Colchester or outside its peer group — and one of them (Berlin) employs two curriculum directors.
• The closest real example of the proposal's structure is East Hampton: one Director of Curriculum & Instruction, about 1,700 students — roughly 80% of Colchester's size.

Claim 5The $140,000 director — below Colchester's own 2021-22 rate, with duties unassigned

"Addition of a Director of Curriculum and Instruction, budgeted at approximately $140,000 annually… would reduce recurring base-salary costs by approximately $65,700 annually…"— Proposal, pages 1 and 5

What the record shows

• Colchester last paid the director version of this job $157,009 base plus a $3,500 doctorate stipend — the FY 2021-22 budget book's line for the Director of Teaching & Learning ("Step 4 per union contract schedule"), rising to $160,519 in FY 2022-23, the final year on the union director scale.
• $140,000 is 11–13% below those rates. Either the real hire costs more (shrinking the claimed savings), or the district is offering below its own past rate, during a public budget crisis.
• The job is bigger than "curriculum." The Board-approved job description (June 13, 2023) makes this one position: District Test Coordinator for state testing, District Family Engagement Coordinator, the state Diversity/Equity/Inclusion contact, Postsecondary Readiness Lead, chair of new-teacher induction and the state-mandated TEAM mentoring program, writer of the Consolidated and Perkins grants, supervisor of the Technology Director and the Multilingual Learning Coordinator, an evaluator of school administrators — and the person who "takes on additional duties in Superintendent's absence."
• Those duties don't vanish with the title. They land on the new director, on principals, or on the superintendent's office — which, under this plan, is an acting superintendent in her first year.

Claim 5, continuedWhat a curriculum director would cover — and the dozen jobs left over

Every duty below comes from the Board-approved Assistant Superintendent job description (June 13, 2023). The left column is the job the proposal creates. Everything on the right still has to happen — and the proposal never says who does it.

The proposal could assign some of these duties to its new director or to others — it simply doesn't address them. Duties paraphrased for plain language; the exact text is in the job description PDF (source 2).

Claim 6Skipping the superintendent for a year — allowed, but one-year and priced at zero

"Elimination of the Superintendent position from the 2026/2027 budget. … Continue utilizing the existing CT Department of Education-approved Acting Superintendent arrangement for the remainder of the fiscal year."— Proposal, page 1

What the record shows

• State law requires a superintendent for a district of Colchester's size (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 10-157) — and caps an acting superintendent at one school year, plus a single one-year extension the Commissioner can grant for hardship.
• The clock is running. Colchester's acting superintendent was appointed April 28, 2026; carrying the arrangement through June 2027 pushes against that limit and depends on state cooperation.
• The plan assumes zero extra cost — no acting stipend, and nothing to cover the elementary-principal seat the acting superintendent came from.
• By the proposal's own terms, this is a one-year saving, not a recurring one.

The elementary school question: one principal, two schools

• CES's principal became the acting superintendent — and one principal now covers two schools. The coverage plan is for Jack Jackter Intermediate School Principal Stacy Ewings to serve as principal of both JJIS and CES (reported to the author; see sourcing note below). That is one principal for two buildings and roughly half the district's students — in her second year leading JJIS.
• Almost none of this is in the public record. As of August 8, 2026 the district's websites still list O'Meara as both Acting Superintendent and CES Principal, and no Board agenda item, vote, minutes entry, or district webpage documents the two-school arrangement.
• The proposal prices the whole patch at $0. Its superintendent "saving" assumes the acting arrangement — and the principal split beneath it — costs nothing: no stipend, no backfill, no added support for either building.
• The arrangement is not analyzed anywhere. Two decades of research find the principal is among the largest in-school influences on student learning, because the effect reaches every classroom. Neither the proposal nor the public record contains a workload analysis, a time-split plan, or any assessment of what a two-school principalship means for either building.

Claim 7The pupil-services cut — the proposal offers no supporting data, and says so

"But providing those services does not necessarily require another layer of non-student-facing management."— Proposal, page 5

"…I do not claim to have enough information to make a broad judgment about the individual performance of either the Director or Assistant Director of Pupil Services."— Proposal, pages 6-7

What the record shows

• No data behind it. The proposal offers no caseload numbers, no workload data, and no comparison of special-education needs now versus the years the district ran without the position — and concedes the gap itself.
• This work is mandate-driven. Special-education administration means legally required meetings, evaluations, and compliance deadlines; mistakes carry costs (legal fees, settlements, out-of-district placements) that can exceed an administrator's salary.
• Peers are split. About half of the eleven peer districts fund a second special-education administrator, usually titled "Supervisor" or "Coordinator."
• In summary: the cut may be workable; the proposal presents nothing that shows it is.

Finding — the plan against itselfRead side by side, the proposal's own lines and its headline do not agree

No outside sources are needed for this section — every number comes from the proposal's own table and text.

It pays for the same job twice

• The $140,000 director starts now; the $205,713 contract runs to June 2028. The proposal's own table funds the new Director of Curriculum & Instruction immediately, while the Assistant Superintendent's contract is paid from reserves "until those obligations expire." That is ≈$346,000 a year for one curriculum-leadership seat.
• That's ≈$140,000 a year more than leaving the position in place — roughly $280,000 extra through June 2028. The swap the proposal prices as a $65,700-a-year saving doesn't pay back its own transition cost until about 2032.

Most of the superintendent "saving" is the same money paid from a different account

• The two figures line up. The eliminated budget line is $260,228, which the proposal notes "includes $6k travel stipend." The reserves then pay the former superintendent "up to $254k" — which is what is left of that line once the stipend is set aside ($260,228 − $6,000 = $254,228).
• Same money, same person, different account. The proposal counts the whole $260,228 as savings while up to about $254,000 flows out of reserves to the person the line used to pay. On a total-taxpayer basis, year-one savings on that seat are therefore at most about $6,000 — and less if the payout comes in below its ceiling, which the proposal's "up to" and its "under certain circumstances" leave open.

It schedules a budget increase it never mentions

• "Restore the Superintendent position in the 2027/2028 budget" means next year's budget must rise by a superintendent's salary — $260,000 or more — on top of the base this plan just lowered.
• The rebound is built into the plan and not addressed in it. A lowered base also lowers the state's minimum-budget baseline, so year two opens with a visible, referendum-sized increase in a town that has already voted budgets down twice. The proposal presents year one and says nothing about year two's arithmetic.

Two smaller lines

• The $27,000 daycare line is revenue, not a spending cut. Rent coming in doesn't reduce what the schools spend — yet it's counted inside the "BOE budget reduction" total.
• The daycare remedy contradicts the daycare complaint. The letter's grievance is that the provider got space "without what I understand to have been a competitive RFP process" — and its fix keeps that exact arrangement and charges rent. The complaint is about the selection process; the remedy addresses the price.

Finding — the missing price tagsEverything the plan needs but prices at zero

Each item below is a real, near-certain cost of actually carrying out the proposal. None appears anywhere in its math.

• Severance and payouts for the other eliminations. The Assistant Director of Pupil Services and the Finance Director aren't covered by the two contract payouts the plan does count — accrued leave, notice terms, and separation costs go unaddressed.
• Unemployment costs. Connecticut towns and school districts typically self-reimburse unemployment claims dollar-for-dollar, so laid-off administrators' claims come straight back to the budget.
• Bumping rights. Administrator-union contracts can let a displaced administrator claim another position, cascading one elimination into someone else's job — and someone else's separation costs.
• A superintendent search in year two. Restoring the position means running a search — consultants and advertising typically run to five figures — conducted by a central office with four fewer positions than it has today. There's no budget line to absorb it: Colchester's own budget books carry only a small district-wide employment-advertising line, roughly $580–$1,700 a year ("Newspaper employment, CT REAP"), and no search-consultant line at all.
• The acting superintendent's compensation. The proposal concedes that any additional pay "would reduce the estimated savings accordingly" — and then prices it at zero anyway.
• Grant management with no named owner. The eliminated Assistant Superintendent writes and manages the federal Consolidated and Perkins grants, and the Pupil Services office losing its assistant director administers IDEA, the federal special-education grant. Together, per the town's audited FY 2024-25 federal single audit, the two offices being cut administer $904,781 a year in ongoing federal education grants — two to three times the plan's real recurring savings — plus $497,321 in expiring pandemic funds that year:

  Grant (audited FY 2024-25 expenditures)	Managed by	Amount
  Title I-A — support for lower-income students (84.010)	Assistant Superintendent (eliminated)	$145,621
  Title II-A — teacher quality & development (84.367)	Assistant Superintendent (eliminated)	$41,398
  Title IV-A — student support & enrichment (84.424)	Assistant Superintendent (eliminated)	$8,176
  Title III — English learners (84.365)	Assistant Superintendent (eliminated)	$4,175
  Perkins — career & technical education (84.048)	Assistant Superintendent (eliminated)	$26,074
  IDEA special-education cluster — Part B + Preschool (84.027/84.173)	Pupil Services (asst. director eliminated)	$679,337
  Ongoing federal education grants, FY 24-25		$904,781
  One-time pandemic funds also expended (ESSER/ARP, 84.425)		$497,321
  Total U.S. Department of Education, FY 24-25		$1,402,102

  Audited figures from the Town of Colchester's FY 2024-25 federal single audit (Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards). Town-wide, the audit shows $3,513,690 expended across 43 federal awards, with the U.S. Department of Education as the town's federal oversight agency. Amounts are expenditures during the year and can span multiple award years.

  The proposal does not say who would manage this money. The person who writes the applications is eliminated. The office running the largest grant loses its second administrator. And the financial oversight behind all of it shrinks to half of one shared director's time. The duties could be reassigned — to the proposed Director of Curriculum & Instruction, to the remaining Director of Pupil Services, or elsewhere — but the proposal names no one and prices no added workload. Federal grants are not passive income: every dollar must be applied for, spent by the rules, documented, and reported, every year.

• The most recent audit identified a grant-compliance deficiency. The FY 2024-25 single audit's only finding (2025-001, a significant deficiency in internal control) was a federal grant procurement failure inside the education department: two purchases over the $25,000 bid threshold — part of the $199,999 Bacon Academy carpet project, paid with a federal pass-through grant — made "without the required competitive bids or price quotations" and with no documented bid waiver. The audit also records that the town does not qualify as a low-risk auditee. The proposal would reduce the staff assigned to grant administration and school-side finance in the year following that finding.
• The people to run it all. Executing four position eliminations, two contract payouts, a superintendent search, forensic-audit remediation, and a third referendum falls to a first-year acting superintendent — with one principal covering two schools beneath her — plus a coordinator-level HR office and a finance office this same plan cuts in half.

A fair check cuts both waysWhat the proposal gets right

• The 2022 re-title happened as described. The Assistant Superintendent title was created in June 2022 by elevating the existing Director of Teaching & Learning — the budget book confirms it. Pay then climbed: from a $160,519 union-scale director salary (FY 2022-23) to a $205,713 individually-contracted one.
• Restoring music and world language is a real, visible gain for students. The only classroom-level changes in the plan are additions.
• Sharing finance with Town Hall is not radical — Colchester did it until 2022. The FY 2022-23 budget book says the district's new Business Director position "replaces previously BOE/Town shared (50/50) positions of CFO and Deputy CFO." The proposal would put that shared model back — though only half of it: the pre-2022 arrangement had two shared senior finance people (a CFO and a Deputy CFO), while the proposal funds half of one person's time (≈$59,000 of a ≈$118,000 salary) to lead finance for a $49 million school system.
• The concern about procurement discipline has independent support. The FY 2024-25 federal single audit's only finding was the education department skipping required competitive bids on the $199,999 Bacon Academy carpet project — a federally funded purchase — with no documented waiver. The letter's concern about purchasing practice is consistent with what the auditors found.
• The unaddressed counterweight: a forensic audit in February 2026 traced a years-long health-fund error to a funding methodology no one caught, and the FY 24-25 single audit flagged a procurement deficiency. The proposal would reduce school-side finance to half of one shared position; it does not address how either oversight gap would be covered.

ProcessWho actually decides — and the one-sentence paper trail

• Voters and the Board of Finance control only the total. State law says school money "shall be expended by and in the discretion of the board of education" (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 10-222).
• Which jobs exist is the Board of Education's call alone — so the proposal's requested "commitments" not to recreate positions would bind no one, now or later.
• The unenforceability cuts the other way, too. The plan's financing depends on the Board of Finance approving supplemental appropriations "as necessary during each applicable fiscal year" — but no Board of Finance can pre-commit those votes either. Every transfer needs its own vote at the time it is requested — the proposal does not say how many there would be — and a single refusal would strand a signed contract with no funding mid-year.
• The 2022 paper trail is a caution for everyone. When the Assistant Superintendent position was created on June 14, 2022, the entire written justification in the Board's public agenda was one sentence: "RECOMMENDATION: To appoint an Assistant Superintendent of Colchester Public Schools." No memo, no cost analysis. Residents on any side of this debate can reasonably ask that positions be created — and eliminated — with more written justification than that.

BackgroundThe "Assistant Superintendent" title is four years old — the job is decades old

Colchester has long had one district-level curriculum leader. What changed in 2022 was the title — and, a year later, the pay.