Squeezed between a political leadership that fails to recognize the value of maintaining quality schools and Norwich Free Academy trustees who are in no mood to talk about sharing the pain of budget cuts, Norwich Public Schools are in serious trouble.

Taking direction from Mayor Deberey Hinchey and the City Council, acting City Manager John Bilda released a proposed budget last week that would hold city schools to a 1 percent increase. That means cutting $3.5 million from the $75.8 million that the Board of Education says it needs to meet contractual obligations and maintain existing programs and class sizes. A review of Superintendent Abby Dolliver’s suggested budget revisions makes it clear the cuts to meet that arbitrary 1 percent mandate would be devastating.

She suggests consolidating all sixth-grade classes at Teachers’ Memorial Middle School, now home to a traditional grades 6-8 program. Kelly Middle School, also 6-8, would host all seventh- and eighth-grade classes in the city and lose grade six. There is no educational purpose to making Teachers’ a six-grade-only school or swelling enrollment at Kelly. Instead, driving these moves is the need to save money by consolidating as many classes as possible and eliminating teaching positions. The middle-school changes along with class consolidations in elementary schools would eliminate about 34 teaching positions and 30 non-certified support staff, according to Ms. Dolliver. In many instances, class sizes would grow from the low 20s to around 30, approaching unmanageable.

If that happens, education will suffer and teachers will flee to other school systems. If Norwich’s leaders let this occur in their school system, they can also bet on more families, who have the means, to escape to other communities. If the goal is to make the city unattractive to young families and drive home values down, this is the way to do it.

Unlike other communities, the Norwich Board of Education’s options in trying to trim spending are very limited. It cannot spread the cuts through all grades, because Norwich does not have its own high school, instead sending students to Norwich Free Academy. NFA charges Norwich a per pupil tuition fee, set by its unelected, self-appointed board. Next year that tuition goes up 2.5 percent. Tuition will be $11,872 per student, but for special education students will range from $17,157 to $63,832, with most special needs students falling in the lower range. The tuition prices are non-negotiable.

That means NFA locks up 30 percent of the budget. Another 30 percent goes to providing special education services for students in city schools, those expenses largely mandated by state law. Savings can only be found by eliminating services or boosting class sizes for non-special education students in pre-K through eighth grade, just 40 percent of the budget. In past years, this has meant cutting instrumental music and language programs.

NFA Board of Trustees Chairman Theodore Phillips said Norwich was a participant in the consortium of towns that use the academy as their school, negotiations that led to a proposed five-year contract extension with its eight member towns. It sets the rules for use of the academy as the designated high school. The other NFA sending members are Bozrah, Preston, Voluntown, Franklin, Sprague, Canterbury and Lisbon.

The Norwich school board has refused to sign, seeking a separate contract that includes fiscal consideration for its special role as the host city, responsible for all emergency services and providing two-thirds of NFA’s 1,900 students. Mr. Phillips said that demand came too late in the process after a deal was in place and that the trustees will not entertain separate negotiations with the host city. As for helping Norwich schools absorb the fiscal pain, Mr. Phillips said NFA is already a bargain compared to the per pupil cost of traditional public high schools.

NFA’s only accommodation is to give Norwich a $100 break in per pupil tuition, a number unchanged in decades. Granted, NFA is a great school for a good price, and perhaps the Norwich school board should have made its intentions known sooner, but NFA is wrong to flatly refuse to open discussions with the school board.

Where does Mayor Hinchey stand? Is she OK with NFA turning a deaf air to her city? Is she fine with seeing city schools decimated? The woman who was elected promising to be a full-time mayor has been absent on this issue. She did not return the call The Day placed with her office Tuesday.

No one likes a tax increase, but sometimes a failure to spend can be more damaging to a community. That is the situation facing Norwich and its schools.