The public records cited in this section, in the order they appear: the minutes, packets and recordings of Andover's own meetings.
At the November 12, 2025 Board of Education meeting the superintendent addressed a records request from First Selectman Jeff Maguire consisting of four spreadsheets seeking preschool cost data, including each student's town of residence and the tuition paid, together with staff insurance enrollment. Present as the ex officio member, he pressed the request on the record: he said he had listed the children only as student one through sixty-four, asked why the data could not simply be redacted, and argued that the board could not have analysed whether the preschool is costly to the town "without getting the details," and cannot truly evaluate the program without them.
The federal statute protecting the privacy of student education records. Where a request for information would resolve to an identifiable student, FERPA requires a school district to withhold it.
The FERPA regulation defining "personally identifiable information" to include not only direct identifiers but indirect ones, and any information that, alone or combined with other information a reader already has, is linked or linkable to a specific student such that a reasonable person in the school community could identify that student with reasonable certainty. This is the legal basis for the principle that an aggregate taken over a sufficiently small group is not truly anonymous.
The confidentiality provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (34 C.F.R. 300.610 through 300.627), which extend FERPA-style protection to personally identifiable information about children with disabilities.
The collective bargaining agreement covering the district's certified staff, setting salaries and the structure of insurance and benefits. It defines the benefit choices, plan tiers and cost shares that make an aggregate benefit figure taken over a small group of named positions reversible to individuals.
The collective bargaining agreement covering the district's non-certified staff, including paraprofessionals, setting classifications, wages and insurance. Together with the teachers' contract it defines the benefit structure for the preschool's paraprofessional positions.
The Connecticut Freedom of Information Act provision governing public employees' personnel, medical and similar files, and the process by which disclosure that would constitute an invasion of personal privacy may be objected to. It is the state-law basis on which a district withholds benefit detail that would identify individual employees.
The HIPAA definitional provision. Information a town holds as an employer, in payroll and budget records, is treated as employment records, which HIPAA's own definition of protected health information excludes. HIPAA is the law most often reached for in a health-privacy argument, and it is generally not the one that governs here: the protection of employee benefit detail rests on Connecticut's freedom of information statute, and the protection of student information rests on FERPA and IDEA.
The federal agencies' joint guidance establishing the boundary between the two regimes: HIPAA's definition of protected health information excludes records covered by FERPA, so a student's school health record falls under one regime rather than both.
At the same meeting the superintendent explained on the record why the four- spreadsheet request could not be filled. Under FERPA, student financial records, including tuition payment records and who has or has not paid, are protected. Under Connecticut's freedom of information statute, confidential student records are withheld. And which staff are enrolled in the town insurance plan, what coverage they have, whom they insure and whether they decline it, is protected employee information. She stated the re- identification problem directly: even listing students by number, adding town of residence and tuition paid, set against the small size of the classes, makes individual children identifiable.
At the February 11, 2026 Board of Education meeting the First Selectman, sitting ex officio, said his "biggest issue" with the school budget is the preschool and that he focuses on it, and questioned whether preschool is still mandated (~1:47:30). Pressed later on where he would cut, he pushed for line-item detail and framed the increases as salary-driven (~2:19:13). The superintendent answered on the record that none of the roughly $499,000 budget increase is attributable to the preschool, and that recent enrollment growth splits roughly evenly between the elementary grades and the preschool (~1:39:40, ~1:59:46).
At the February 25, 2026 joint budget meeting of the finance and selectmen's boards, First Selectman Jeff Maguire pressed the preschool as an out-of-town cost question, asking whether residents are paying for out-of-town students and arguing the tuition does not cover the cost: with roughly fourteen out- of-town or staff children among about sixty-eight preschoolers, "they're paying at a maximum $6,000 of tuition, you're not covering your costs," and "a standard pre-K from a private business is going to be $12,000, you're charging six." He told the finance board, "you guys have to get the proof." The superintendent and board members answered on the record.
At the March 11, 2026 Board of Finance budget meeting the preschool was discussed at length. One member said she had "questions about the fact that we have no idea how much the taxpayers are paying for preschool," and that out-of-town families "are not coming here for any other reason" than the full-day preschool and its wraparound care (~2:11:36-2:13:24). Another member set out the empty-seat logic unprompted: "when you put together a preschool class, you look at how many Andover kids there are, and then you sprinkle in out of town kids to fill that room." The First Selectman was not the speaker on either side of this exchange.
The superintendent and the Board of Education chair answered the Board of Finance's questions about the preschool in detail, on the public record, in February 2021. Out-of-town children are admitted because the Smart Start grant requires an income mix the town alone cannot supply, so the admissions serve the grant's requirements (~1:13:35). Special-education slots pay no tuition, by law; the remaining slots pay full tuition (~1:14:52). Tuition had been raised sharply over the preceding two years and was benchmarked against neighbouring districts, topping out at the formulaic maximum (~1:16:03, ~1:20:18). The program also exists in part to stop the district losing children to magnet schools. Asked whether a large number of out-of- town children would make money for the program, the answer on the record was that it would not: once another classroom has to be opened, the revenue no longer covers the cost (~1:12:28).
In the FY2022-23 budget presentation to the Board of Finance, the superintendent walked through the preschool's grant lines and said that this is "really why when we say preschool, we say pays for itself between the tuition and" the grants (~14:01). She named them: the Smart Start grant pays the preschool salaries; IDEA funds pay the paraprofessional salaries; school readiness money funds sixteen slots and the grant-compliance liaison.
At the January 17, 2024 Board of Education budget workshop the superintendent set out the preschool arithmetic: the third preschool classroom was added because Andover's own enrollment required it, and out- of-town children are admitted afterwards, to fill what is left. "If we had unused slots that were available to our extended program, we could fill them with out of towners, and those out of towners would be full tuition rate" (~40:36-41:28). At the January 24 workshop the board confirmed the program's cost structure: the preschool sits outside the general fund, funded by school readiness money, Smart Start money and tuition.
At the January 14, 2026 Board of Education meeting the superintendent explained that the district began accepting out-of-town preschoolers about two years ago to fill otherwise-empty seats: adding a fourth preschool class left seats unfilled, and out-of-town children, who pay full tuition of $6,000, keep the room sustained as in-town enrollment grows (~59:37). Nine out-of-town children were enrolled this year; with more Andover residents enrolling, four are projected for next year.
At the March 4, 2026 Board of Finance budget meeting the superintendent explained the preschool's finances: tuition is $6,000 per child, matching the state early-start reimbursement rate and unchanged over her tenure; the eight preschool staff salaries are covered by roughly $440,000 of combined grant funding plus that tuition; and without the preschool the district would still owe mandatory special-education services for those children, an estimated $300,000 carried in the general fund with no offsetting tuition, because special-education students pay no tuition by law.
The preschool finance sheet in the April 8, 2026 Board of Education packet, showing the program's anticipated revenue for the year: local tuition of $247,986, an Early Start grant of $123,000 and a Smart Start grant of $65,000, alongside the program's salary lines. The packet is a scanned document; the revenue totals were verified against the page image.
At the May 14, 2025 Board of Education meeting the superintendent gave a detailed public account of how the elementary school receives and spends its money, in response to a newspaper insert that had made claims about the school's finances. She said the school's separate bank account and monthly allowance were established at the First Selectman's request: he asked her to open a separate account for the school, and the town would give it an allowance, as it does for the regional district (~20:47). She described the mechanics as an electronic transfer of about $434,000 in ten payments, July through April, with none in May or June. In the same meeting she set out the preschool's out-of-town admissions logic: a room the school is running anyway has empty seats, an out-of-town child cannot be placed here for special education, and such a child pays full tuition (~1:24:32).