Local towns receive 'onerous' subpoenas in education-funding lawsuit

A coalition representing school districts, parents and education advocates that is suing the state for more equitable education funding complained today that the state Attorney General’s office has subpoenaed “massive and unprecedented” amounts of paperwork and background documents of 10-member school districts for the upcoming court case.

Locally, New London, Norwich and Waterford school districts received the subpoenas for documents dating back 10 years that must be submitted to the Attorney General’s office within 30 days of receiving the subpoena.

The Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding is suing the state on behalf of member districts, individual schoolchildren and their families and educational associations to force changes to education funding formulas to benefit low-income districts and students.

Dianne Kaplan deVries, CCJEF project director, said the subpoenas will place unreasonable burdens on municipal school districts at a time when they have reduced central office staff and are trying to prepare their 2012-13 budgets.

DeVries said the identical subpoenas asked for 46 different pieces of information, about two-thirds of which is required to be reported to the state Department of Education annually. She called it an “extraordinarily costly duplication” for understaffed local districts.

“No district could be expected to comply with such an enormously onerous production order,” deVries said.

Susan Kinsman, spokeswoman for state Attorney General George Jepson, said she had not yet seen the CCJEF press release complaining about the subpoenas and could not yet comment.

Norwich Superintendent Abby Dolliver said the subpoena requested “an array of documents” including budgets for the past 10 years, grant applications, teacher handbooks, curriculum information and information about technology. Norwich received the subpoena Jan. 23, and the information is due by Feb. 21.

“We don’t have a lot of it, and certainly don’t have easy access to records from 2002,” Dolliver said. “We would have to search for them (in filing cabinets), copy them and make them available. It would take someone weeks to put all this together.”

Waterford Superintendent Jerome Belair said he received the subpoena late Friday and has just begun to sort through it. Belair questioned how some of the requested documents even pertain to equitable education funding. For example, the subpoena asked for a roster of all the people who have applied to positions in the Waterford school district over the past 10 years, how many vacant positions the district has had and how many of those positions were filled.

Even though many school records are computerized, Belair said a lot of the information requested wouldn’t be on computers.

Other CCJEF member school districts that received the subpoenas were: Bridgeport, Danbury, Hartford, New Britain, Plainfield, Stamford, Waterford, and Windham.

c.bessette@theday.com