At a recent Board of Finance meeting, while setting a new school budget figure after the failed referendum, a member offered an explanation for why the town finds itself in another budget cycle. The gist was this: last year the Board of Finance cut the school budget, the Board of Education hired the staff it wanted anyway, and now the town is dealing with the consequences.
"Last year their budget was cut and they completely disregarded that cut and hired those people anyway. So they locked in those new contracts for three new hires. And now we're having to deal with it... there's got to be some give and take, and for them to just disregard the budget that we gave them and say, 'We'll, hire these people. We'll figure it out next year.' And that's what happened."
--- Andover Board of Finance meeting, May 27, 2026, at 46:27.
It is worth being precise about this, because the statement rests on a misunderstanding of what each board is actually empowered to do. And it is not an obscure point of trivia. It is the basic division of authority that governs every school budget in Connecticut, written into both state law and our own town charter.
The Board of Finance controls one number: the bottom line. It decides the total dollar amount the town appropriates for the schools. That is a real and significant power, and no one disputes it.
Under Connecticut General Statutes Section 10-222, the local Board of Education prepares an itemized estimate of what it expects to spend and submits it to the Board of Finance. The Board of Finance may then reduce that estimate. It may set the total lower than the schools requested. What it may not do is tell the schools which line items to cut, which positions to fund, or how to allocate the money it appropriates.
The statute also gives the Board of Finance a formal channel to recommend. Within ten days of receiving the estimate, the appropriating authority may make spending recommendations and suggestions about consolidating noneducational services and finding efficiencies. The Board of Education may accept or reject those suggestions, and must provide a written explanation if it rejects them. Note the words the legislature chose: recommendations, suggestions, accept or reject. The Board of Finance advises. It does not direct.
Our town charter follows the same structure. Under Section 802E, the Board of Finance may "add to, delete from, or eliminate" the requests of most town departments, but for the local Board of Education it "may only comment and make recommendations." That is not an accident of drafting. It mirrors the line state law draws.
Everything else.
Connecticut law could hardly be more direct on this point. Under Section 10-222, the money appropriated by the town for the maintenance of public schools is spent "by and in the discretion of the board of education." The Board of Education may transfer any unexpended portion of any appropriation to any other item in its budget, at its own discretion, without asking the Board of Finance for permission. The only hard limit is the total: the schools may not spend more than the town appropriated.
The Connecticut courts settled this nearly a century ago. The foundational case is Groton and Stonington Traction Co. v. Groton, 115 Conn. 151 (1932), and the line of decisions that followed it. The Office of Legislative Research, summarizing that case law, puts it plainly: the Board of Finance controls the total amount of the school budget and must exercise that control reasonably, but the appropriation, once set, is spent by the Board of Education, which controls expenditures within the limits of the total. The same summary notes that the Board of Finance "has no authority to refuse to transfer and transmit to the board of education amounts expended as long as these amounts do not exceed the total appropriation approved by the town."
So consider the claim that the schools "hired the staff anyway."
If the Board of Education staffed those positions while staying within the total the town appropriated, it did exactly what the law authorizes it to do. The Board of Finance set a bottom line. The Board of Education decided how to spend within it. That is not defiance. That is the system working as designed, in our charter and in state statute alike.
The frustration is understandable on a human level. The Board of Finance recommended fewer positions, the schools funded them anyway, and from a seat on the Board of Finance that can feel like being ignored. But "they didn't take our advice" and "they broke the rules" are very different claims, and only the first one is true. The remedy for advice not taken is not in the charter. It is at the next budget, where the Board of Finance can again set the total it believes is right.
This is not a quirk of Connecticut law. It reflects a deliberate choice about who is accountable for educational outcomes.
The people charged with educating our children are the professional educators the Board of Education hires, starting with the Superintendent. They are the ones with the training to decide how many teachers a grade needs, which programs to run, and how to deploy the resources the town provides. A board of finance, by design, is not an educational body. It is a fiscal one. The law gives the Board of Finance control over the total. It deliberately withholds control over the spending. Splitting authority that way keeps budgeting in the hands of the budget experts and education in the hands of the education experts.
The First Selectman, under charter Section 701D(12), is even barred from purchasing for the Board of Education except to the extent that board authorizes it. The charter protects the schools' control over their own operations at every turn.
On the 2024-25 Next Generation Accountability report, the state's official scorecard for districts, Andover outperforms the Connecticut state average on every indicator. The English Language Arts Performance Index is 73.1, against a state average of 64.7. Math is 68.7, against 61.1. Science is 76.5, against 62.6, and above Connecticut's ultimate target of 75. Academic growth in both subjects also runs above the state average. And on chronic absenteeism, students missing 10% or more of school days, Andover stands at 5.6% against a state rate of 17.2%, in the top tier not only of Connecticut as a whole but of the 45 small-town elementary-only districts that share Andover's structural profile.
On the cost side, a companion analysis on this site compares Andover's per-pupil spending against those same 44 peer districts using the Connecticut State Department of Education's published data. Andover spends $19,009 per pupil, the lowest of all 45 districts in the peer set. The peer median is $25,699, which means a median peer district spends $6,690 more per pupil than Andover does. Andover's administrative spending sits at fourth-lowest of the 45 on the combined administrative lines, and the leanness is not explained by district size; a regression across the peer set predicts a 241-student district should spend substantially more than Andover does.
That is what it looks like when the professionals charged with educating our children are given room to do the job the law assigns them, with the resources the town provides. Andover delivers above-state-average outcomes on every measured indicator, on the leanest budget of any comparable district in the state.
The Board of Education did not put the town in a difficult budget position by exercising the authority state law and the charter give it. It used that authority to deliver results. The conversation worth having is not whether the schools should have "listened." It is how a district doing this much with this little deserves to be funded going forward.