Groton - For 10 years, Groton has been moving programs and students to try to achieve racial balance in its schools, with limited success.

Now that the latest proposal to deal with the issue has come forward, during Monday's Board of Education meeting, board member Katrina Fitzgerald asked what would happen if voters rejected a proposed school construction referendum to correct racial imbalance and the problem continued.

"There would be a financial impact," Superintendent Michael Graner said, indicating it would affect the state's Education Cost Sharing grant to Groton.

He couldn't be more specific yet, he said.

But Fitzgerald said Groton can't redistrict every two years, something that board member Kirsten Hoyt said it's been doing.

Last week, the state Board of Education approved a plan to correct a racial imbalance at Claude Chester Elementary School, contingent on voter approval of a referendum to build one new middle school and turn the two middle schools into elementary schools. The proposal, which does not yet have an estimated cost, could go to voters as early as November.

The state considers a school out of balance if the percentage of minority students there is greater or less than 25 percent of the district average. A pending imbalance is triggered by a 15 percent difference. Groton has an average of 43 percent minority students. The average at Claude Chester was 68.2 percent at the time it was cited.

The school construction plan has three goals, Graner said: To make the schools more equitable, efficient and effective. But it's also needed to deal with a problem that has persisted for 10 years, despite repeated shuffling of programs and students.

In speaking to the board Monday, Graner explained that the state cited Groton for a racial imbalance at the former Eastern Point School in April 2004. The district moved special education to S.B. Butler Elementary School and set up full-day kindergarten, with a lottery system, at Eastern Point to try to correct it.

It wasn't enough. Groton was cited again in March 2007 for an imbalance at Eastern Point. The town had a long-range plan to build two new elementary schools and close others, but before what is now Catherine Kolnaski Magnet School even opened, a racial imbalance was discovered, Graner said.

So the Kolnaski School was made a magnet school and it opened in 2008 along with Northeast Academy. Groton closed four elementary schools, including Eastern Point.

It didn't work. In 2009, the state cited Groton for an imbalance at Kolnaski Magnet and said it had pending imbalances at four other schools. So the following year, the school district and town put together a school construction referendum to build a single middle school and reconfigure the district. Then they sent it to voters in 2011.

It was voted down. The imbalance continued and Kolnaski Magnet school was becoming crowded, so the school system moved the fifth-grade students to Claude Chester in September 2012.

The following year, Groton redistricted 16 percent of its elementary school students to correct the imbalance at Kolnaski, including relocating some students from the low-income housing complex Branford Manor into Claude Chester.

The problem resurfaced. In May 2014, the state cited Groton for an imbalance at Claude Chester. Groton also has pending imbalances at three other schools: S.B. Butler, Kolnaski Magnet and Northeast Academy.

d.straszheim@theday.com

Twitter: @DStraszheim