8A REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN W MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2011

Buses arrive to
pick up students at
Mitchell Element-
ary School in
Woodbury on Fri-
day afternoon.
A reconfiguration
of schools in
Region 14 has
raised concerns
over the amount of
time students will
be on the buses.
CHRISTOPHER MASSA
REPUBLICAN-AMERCAN
UCONN: School fights FOI ruling
Continued from Page One
tion Commission disagreed
and ordered UConn in 2009 to
release the records, but a state
Supreme Court judge over-
turned that decision last year.
It’s now pending before the
state’s Appellate Court.
“If public entities can have
trade secrets, then don’t the
trade secrets belong to the pub-
lic?” said UConn alumnus and
former state representative
TODAY’S POLL
VOTE AT WWW.REP-AM.COM
Should the University of
Connecticut release its
supporters’ names?
FIND RESULTS OF YESTERDAY’S
QUESTION ON PAGE 2A.
licly about pending litigation.
Connecticut’s FOI law pre-
Friends of UConn advocacy
and watchdog group. The FOI
Commission ruled the names
of people who donated through
the UConn Foundation can be
withheld because it is a private,
legally separate entity not gov-
erned by the FOI provisions.
“When you think of trade se-
crets, you typically think of an
entity that is engaged in trade,
and for a public university,
that’s not the first thing you
think of,” FOI Commission Ex-

VOTE: Thursday’s referendum Jonathan Pelto, who first re-

will decide fate of local schools
Continued from Page One
in its personal cost to families,
whose youngest school-age
children might ride a bus to
school in another town.
“That’s when we teach our
children things like basic read-
ing, basic math, hygiene, how to
pick up after yourself, basic
family values,” Kolesnik said of
the age group. “So the family
loses that time to a school bus.”
For some, the reconfiguration
launched in 2007 that sent
kindergarten through second
grade pupils to Bethlehem Ele-
mentary School and grades 3-5
to Mitchell Elementary School
in Woodbury welcomed a more
equitable distribution of space,
a uniform curriculum and en-
hanced teacher interactions.
Critics deride the loss of their
community K-5 schools — their
safety, convenience and com-
fort.
Both sides argue that stan-
dardized test results prove their
point.
Save Region 14, a parent
group formed to overturn the
reconfiguration, argues that the
policy adds a disruptive transi-
tion between second and third
grade, disrupts after-school ac-
tivities, divides siblings, and
creates overcrowding at Bethle-
hem that can’t be remedied
with redistricting.
In addition, the group criti-
cizes the reconfiguration for
denying high school students
valuable class time that was cut
to accommodate a third tier of
busing, which also carries a fi-
nancial cost.
“Common sense tells you that
if you go from three runs to two
runs you’re going to reduce
travel by 50 percent,” Kolesnik
said. “In the next negotiation
that should amount to roughly a
50 percent savings.”
The current bus contract
won’t expire for another two
years. Proponents of the recon-
figuration argue that any sav-
ings projected two years into the
future are purely speculative.
And Budrewicz, a member of
the pro-reconfiguration group
Keep Us Together, said she dis-
agrees that the current bus
schedule cuts into family time.
“We live in Connecticut,” Bu-
drewicz said. “It’s rural. It de-
pends on what time you get on
the bus and what the route is.
There’s no guarantee bus rides
will be shorter.”
In Region 14, principle of ‘1 person, 1 vote’ was hard fought
WOODBURY — On Thursday, Region
14 school district voters will decide
the configuration of its grade
schools. It won’t be the first time a le-
gal battle has resulted in a con-
tentious referendum in the district.
In 1974, Woodbury resident Joseph
Scott sued the region in federal court,
arguing its equal apportionment of
Board of Education members be-
tween the differently sized towns vio-
lated the equal protection clause of
the Constitution. He believed Wood-
bury should have greater say in dis-
trict matters because it has a larger
population.
U.S. District Court Judge Jon O. New-
man agreed with Scott and another
plaintiff from Region 5, finding that
the school boards performed a range
of government activities extensive
YES OR NO
A “yes” vote on the question
would allow the current con-
figuration to continue, send-
ing kindergarten through
second grade students to
Bethlehem Elementary
School and grades 3-5 to
Mitchell Elementary School in
Woodbury.
A “no” vote would restore
both schools to K-5 configu-
rations starting with the 2011-
12 school year.
For the “yes” votes to prevail,
a majority in both towns will
have to vote in favor of the
question.
Keep Us Together focuses on
the reconfiguration’s consistent
class sizes and more unified ed-
ucational experience. The
group touts the policy for draw-
ing together children and fami-
lies across town lines earlier
and easing the transition to
middle school.
“After reconfiguration, both
towns have the same interest,”
Budrewicz said of a new sense
of shared ownership. “Every-
one has equality throughout.
We all pay for all the schools.”
The group also derides the
cost to hire an estimated 3.6 ad-
ditional teachers, though their
opponents argue the district
could re-allocate administra-
tive faculty to accommodate the
need.
In addition, Keep Us Togeth-
er conducted a survey that
found 82 percent of certified
staff polled found greater edu-
cational merit in the reconfig-
ured schools than K-5 schools.
“We as parents, as far as I’m
concerned, need to trust the ed-
ucators who are our experts,”
said Maryanne Van Aken, the
group’s founder. “Just like
when we go to the doctor.”
Kolesnik called the survey
results “preposterous” for only
reflecting 39 percent of the dis-
trict’s total staff.
“To say that the survey over-
whelmingly shows support for
reconfiguration when mathe-
matically they didn’t even cap-
ture 50 percent of the teachers
in the survey is blatantly mis-
leading,” he said.
No matter how the vote turns
out, representatives on both
sides agree the debate will not
enough to require the application of
the principle of one person, one vote.
The Region 14 Board of Education
voted unanimously to appeal the de-
cision to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals in New York, and in July 1975
its three judges affirmed the lower
court’s ruling.
That August, Region 14’s board voted
7-1 to appeal the case to the U.S.
Supreme Court. But in March 1976,
the high court declined to hear the
case, letting the decision of the ap-
peals court stand. The denial trig-
gered a state law passed after earlier
decisions requiring school districts
to reorganize under the one person,
one vote principle.
Region 14 formed a reapportionment
committee that eventually proposed
History of Region 14
reconfiguration
WOODBURY — In October 2006,
three months after Superintendent
Robert D. Cronin arrived in Region
14, the Board of Education followed
his recommendation and voted
unanimously to reconfigure the ele-
mentary schools.
Cronin arrived the month after dis-
trict voters defeated a referendum
question asking to fund $37 million
in renovations to the schools, in-
cluding an expansion of Mitchell El-
ementary School. Since 2005, the
district had sent that school’s
fourth graders to Woodbury Middle
School. Before that, Mitchell and
Bethlehem Elementary schools
housed kindergarten through fifth-
grade students, primarily drawn
from their respective towns.
Beginning in 2007, kindergarten
through second-grade strudents at-
tended Bethlehem Elementary
School and grades 3-5 attended
Mitchell.
In June 2007, Bethlehem residents
John Pratt and Susan Scherf sued
the district, contending the Board of
Education denied them their rights
as voters by implementing its plan
without calling for a referendum to
amend the 1968 plan that regional-
ized the school systems in Bethle-
hem and Woodbury.
On July 21, Litchfield Superior Court
Judge John W. Pickard decided for
the district, ruling the reconfigura-
tion did not constitute a fundamen-
tal change to the regional plan
requiring a public referendum.
Just days after Pickard’s decision,
however, the state Supreme Court
ruled in favor of Bridgewater in its
lawsuit contesting the Region 12
school district’s plan to create a
consolidated elementary school. In
the decision, the court overturned
some if its own reasoning from a
1975 case Pickard used to guide his
decision.
Pickard allowed the sides to rear-
gue the case, and in December 2009
he overturned his earlier ruling and
ordered Region 14 to restore the
schools to K-5.
The Board of Education voted to ap-
peal the decision, but a new majori-
ty seated in July voted to end the
appeal and call a referendum to al-
low voters the opportunity to de-
cide the district’s future.
— Rick Harrison
likely vanish.
“When people start talking to
each other this way, this prob-
lem is not going away,” Bu-
drewicz said, hoping people
don’t vote no out of anger that
they couldn’t vote in 2006.
“I don’t want to tell people
how to vote,” she said. “But
there’s more to it than what
happened four years ago.”
To comment on this story, vis-
it www.rep-am.com.
a plan — blessed by the state Depart-
ment of Education — in which all
school board members would be
elected at large, so that residents
could vote for candidates regardless
of where they are from.
But in a referendum in February 1978,
Woodbury voters failed to pass the
plan by a 196-160 vote. Only seven of
389 Bethlehem voters voted no.
The measure passed in a second ref-
erendum that spring, leading to an
election of a full board in June.
“Since that time, there’s never been
any issue,” said George Largay, a
Board of Education member at the
time of the lawsuit who served on the
reapportionment committee. “It real-
ly has worked out very well.”
— Rick Harrison
quested the information. “Con-
necticut has one of the best
Freedom of Information acts in
the country, but there are gray
areas and this, as far as UConn
is concerned, is a gray area.”
A university spokesman said
UConn would not comment be-
cause it does not speak pub-
TRASH: Towns producing less of it
Continued from Page One
agency that processes trash
and recyclables for 96 cities
and towns in the state, has seen
the amount of trash rise slowly
as the economy starts to pick
back up.
Between July 2009 and June
2010, the agency collected
748,232 tons of trash in central
Connecticut, a rise of about 2
percent from the previous year.
“It’s coming back kind of
slowly, which tells me that
people are still kind of cautious
about their money,” Nonnen-
macher said. “There’s still a lot
of people that are unemployed
and underemployed, and it’s
still a very uncertain economy
MOMS: Gas
can help with
labor pains
Continued from Page One
intrigued by the option.
“I would definitely think
about it, and read about and
talk to my doctor about it,”
said Rowell, 36, of Concord.
“It is nice to know that it
doesn’t affect the baby, be-
cause that’s what scares me
about an epidural.”
Though nitrous oxide is
commonly used for labor pain
relief in Canada, Great Britain
and other countries, it’s been
all but abandoned in the Unit-
ed States in favor of other op-
tions, such as epidurals, said
Judith Bishop a certified
nurse midwife at the Univer-
sity of California San Francis-
co Medical Center and leader
in the effort to reintroduce ni-
trous oxide for labor.
With an epidural, medica-
tion to block pain seeps
through a tube into space sur-
rounding the spinal cord. Be-
cause it must be
administered by an anesthe-
siologist, an epidural is signif-
icantly more expensive than
nitrous oxide.
sumes all government infor-
mation is public unless it meets
certain exemptions, including
company trade secrets that are
in a public agency’s hands be-
cause of bidding, contracting
or other circumstances.
Pelto requested the UConn
information in 2008, hoping to
reach more people for the
for a lot of people.”
When the agency collects
less trash for its trash-to-ener-
gy plants, it in turn generates
less power and loses revenue,
Nonnenmacher said.
Recycling statistics are less
telling. Department of Envi-
ronmental Protection statistics
show a slight drop statewide,
which can be explained by the
economy as well, said Judy
Belaval, an environmental an-
alyst with the department.
CRRA numbers show a
steady increase in the recy-
clables collected in central
Connecticut, which could be
accounted for by the increased
popularity of single-stream re-
cycling in the region, Nonnen-
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Check out these and other Big Deals
in today’s classified section!
ecutive Director Colleen Mur-
phy said. “Here you have a
public university that gener-
ates a lot of revenue, including
from people who are on some
of these lists. Unless there’s a
specific provision that says in-
formation shouldn’t be dis-
closed, the general rule would
be disclosure.”
macher said.
Since the CRRA charges
municipalities by the ton for
the trash it has to process,
those that collected less trash
during the recession had
slightly lower costs during the
financial crisis.
The drop in trash processing
costs was not significant and
nothing to celebrate, Torring-
ton Mayor Ryan J. Bingham
said.
“I’d rather there be a better
economy than us picking up
less trash, because there are
more things that are affected
negatively by a poor econo-
my,” Bingham said. “The pros
are far outweighed by the cons
of the recession.”
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