The contract, and the law firm

A vote that was taken and not written down became, in his hands, a raise slipped past the public. The board wrote it down again. The implication that she is overpaid runs into a number.

The First Selectman has never called for cutting the superintendent’s salary, and this account is not going to say he has.

What he has done, repeatedly, is imply that she is overpaid, and that the raise in her contract was somehow slipped past the public. In February 2026, asked as the ex officio member where he would cut the school’s budget, he restated his standing demand for line-item detail and named salaries as the main increase ^[1]. In March 2026 he sent the Board of Education a letter from a law firm questioning her contract ^[2].

The specific charge is that the raise is not in the minutes. That charge is true, and it is worth being straight about rather than defensive.

On October 9, 2025 the Board of Education took the superintendent’s contract into executive session, came back out, and approved it. The approval does not appear in the written record ^[3].

That is a real lapse, and the board should not have let it happen. It is a lapse against the board’s own ordinary practice, which is the thing that most needs saying: eighteen months earlier, in April 2023, the same board approved the previous renewal of the same contract seven to nothing, in open session, and wrote the vote into its minutes, exactly as you would expect ^[4]. They know how to do it. In October they did not do it.

But a hole in the paperwork is not a secret in the contract, and the difference matters.

In March 2026, after the letter arrived, the Board of Education took the matter up in public and held a recorded roll-call vote affirming the contract ^[5]. It passed. Whatever was or was not written down in October, the contract has now been affirmed by a recorded public vote of the elected board that employs her. There is nothing left to find.

Which leaves the substance. Is she overpaid?

In 2025-26, Andover paid its superintendent $100,000 a year: $90,000 in salary and a $10,000 retirement contribution ^[6].

It paid that for six tenths of a superintendent. Her Andover contract engages her at 0.6 full-time-equivalent. The other four tenths belong to Scotland, which employs her under its own separate contract ^[6].

So the useful question is not what Andover pays. It is what Andover pays per unit of the person. Normalized to a full-time position, Andover’s rate works out to $166,667 ^[6].

Set that against every other Connecticut school district that runs only elementary grades, which is the only fair comparison there is. Contracts were collected for thirty-nine of them, from town clerks, district websites and records requests, and every one was normalized the same way. Among the peers with current contracts, Andover ranks twenty-third out of twenty-four. The median peer pays $193,157, about sixteen percent more than Andover. The only district in the state paying less is Eastford, whose superintendent works one hundred and four days a year ^[6].

The obvious objection is that Andover is small, and small districts should pay less. The data says otherwise. Across this cohort, pay is essentially uncorrelated with enrollment. Small Connecticut elementary districts pay a market rate for the job, whether they have a hundred students or a thousand ^[6].

And the study says plainly what it does not yet have: current contracts for five more peer districts are still being sought, and one of them could conceivably come in at or below Andover ^[6]. That is worth knowing, and it is in the report, and it does not move the picture much. Twenty-three out of twenty-four is not a close call.

You can keep implying she is overpaid, or that something was hidden. The board has now voted on the contract in public, on the record, by name. The number is what it is, and anyone can check it.

The implication just keeps coming.

The contract, and the law firm

Sources