This is a follow-up to my piece on the Madison Academy Community Center Project.

Academy update.

First, on the topic of the conversion of the derelict Academy building into a community center, one wonders if the project is now dead.

Since the publication of my analysis, the town has discreetly fired Colliers, the building manager for this and other town building projects, from the Academy project. Generally, when the project manager gets fired from a real estate project, that’s a sign the project is going into long-term hibernation.

It’s easy to see why:

• Apart from the fact that the project was going to be a massive drag on the budget for a generation and was economically asinine, every single one of the various cost-cutting or cost-sharing measures the town adopted to try to justify incurring the even larger fiscal hit to taxpayers has been eliminated in the last sixty days.
• The low bidder withdrew.
• Federal funding from the Department of Agriculture [because apparently Madison qualifies as a rural community by federal definitions – lol] has been frozen as part of the Executive Branch grant freeze.
• The BOS’ perfidious decision to buy Chinese steel instead of “Buying American,” to save costs, was stymied spectacularly by the Trump Administration’s decisions to impose across-the-board 25% tariffs on steel, and rumored plans to impose tariffs on foreign copper (both of which will drive up materials costs across the board, but in particular the copper tariffs would increase the cost for installation of electrical systems, which was one of the major budget components unplanned for in the 2022 referendum budget).
• The work of the Academy Building Committee has been paused.

What nobody at Town Campus is willing to say publicly, so I will, is that the budget for this project has almost certainly been irrecoverably blown, and with rising inflation the 2022 referendum numbers make less and less sense by the day. If I had to guess, the $15 million number from 2022 – which was inadequate even when it was approved by voters for the scale of the project the BOS intended to pursue – would be closer to $30 million if it were re-run today.

The right thing to do is raze the building and create some nice open space. I suspect, as has happened every year for the last two decades, that what will happen instead is that the project will continue in limbo because a bunch of folks who are emotionally attached to an environmentally unsound wreck of a structure – a wreck because 22 years of Madison leadership left it to rot – are politically influential and are unwilling to let it go. This means that the easiest thing for town management to do is to try to keep the project on life support.

2025-26 budget.

Which brings us to the town’s latest budgetary madness.

The Board of Selectmen proposes to spend $100,000,000 this year.

Officially, $65,000,000 of that – $26,595 per student per year – is for schools. Unofficially, however, the town moves a ton of educational expense onto its municipal ledger, so the real number is probably closer to $30,000 per student per year.

For example, last year over $3 million in expenditure on Polson school was covered by the town’s general municipal ledger. So too, this year, will be approximately $3 million in bond interest and principal payments that are incurred by schools (either under construction or disused) but counted on our municipal ledger.

“How can Madison spend nearly $30,000 per student per year but not have the budget to keep my fourth grader’s music classes?” I hear you ask.

Allow me to explain.

In the projected budget, $2.9 million of that is interest payments on debt for the Academy project and (mostly) debt incurred for the construction of Neck River elementary school. This is $2.9 million Madison taxpayers would have back in their pockets if the administration simply balanced the books every year like they’re supposed to. It’s also between 40 and 60 teachers’ salaries.

When we add the schools’ $65 million of opex into the mix our total expenditure on schooling works out, ballpark, to something like a total of $68,000,000 spent on schools and their upkeep.

If we then divide that by 2,444 students in the school system, that works out to a staggering educational expenditure of something like $27,823 per student, assuming no decline in enrollments vis a vis last year. If enrollments decline by mere 5%, as has been seen in other Connecticut towns, then the per-student cost would be over $30,000.

At any rate, what Madison spends is staggering. It’s nearly 150% of the in-state tuition at UConn. That level of spending makes Madison, on a per capita basis, one of the most expensive public school systems in the country.

For context, other good public school systems cost a lot less per-student per-annum – see e.g.

• Avon ($21,000) (student:teacher ratio 12:1),
• Haddam-Killingworth ($23,500) (11:1) or
• Fairfield ($23,500) (11:1).

Even Greenwich (11:1), a fairly Gucci public school system in a district where cost of living and doing business is much higher than it is in Madison, only comes in at $28,662 per student per year.

As if the public school comparisons weren’t bad enough, let’s compare Madison to the day-school tuition numbers of some of the best schools in the shoreline area:

• OLM Prep: $10,500 for one student enrolled, $7,300 per student if you have 4 students enrolled. (9:1) (K-8)
• Xavier: $18,600 (12.7:1)
• The Williams School (New London) – $35,600 (Grades 6-9) – $38,600 (Grades 10-12) (7:1)
• The Country School, Madison – $29,000 for lower grades, $39,000 for upper grades (5:1)

MPS’ costs (student-teacher ratio: 10.2:1) are closer to those of elite schools like Williams (7:1) or Deerfield Academy (4:1) than an OLM Prep or a Xavier, or even a comparable public school.

The cost is roughly on par with the Country School in Madison, a highly rated private school with a tiny student body and a student-teacher ratio 100% better than MPS. If the Country School doubled its student/teacher ratio to 10:1, like MPS, they could generate the same revenue while cutting their tuition in half, to roughly $15,000-$19,500 per student.

So, once we equalize for student:teacher ratios, and even (in two out of four cases) if we don’t, basically every private school within driving distance of Madison – and, it seems, probably every public school within driving distance, too – can teach a child less expensively than Madison’s public schools can.

Revealed preferences tell us that an OLM, a Country School or a DA is also preferable to whatever it is that MPS is doing, since local parents who can afford it consistently elect to pull their kids out of the public system and send them to local private options, instead. In the absence of evidence that all of Madison’s graduates are getting early action admission to Harvard, the fact that a municipal organization is spending a lot of money is most often not a sign that it’s doing something well; rather it’s a sign that it is doing something inefficiently.

Public schools, as a general rule, are spending more and delivering less in recent years.

To give you some idea of the scale of the waste, it would be cheaper to disband the public school system, raze the buildings, turn the spaces into parks, and educate all of Madison’s children privately than to continue doing what we’re currently doing.

I repeat: we could educate every child in Madison privately and it would be cheaper. Right now, today, Madison could make the policy choice that private schooling should no longer be reserved for the wealthy, and cut every parent a check for $25,000 per kid, per year, to be used on tuition and we would spend considerably less than we currently spend on schools. We could have the most gold-plated school voucher program in the United States, five times more generous than equivalent programs in New Hampshire and Arizona.

Or you could hire a private tutor for study groups of five kids for $100,000/year, cutting the student/teacher ratio by more than half to a number traditionally only enjoyed by aristocrats or attendees at the nation’s most elite boarding schools, and allocate $25,000 for expenses like museum trips and the like. For every single child in town.

And the cost to the taxpayer would be lower than this year’s municipal budget.

The amount of money Madison spends on its schools is insane. After we normalize for student-teacher ratios, Madison’s price-per-student is anywhere from 10% to 300% the price of every single school we’ve mentioned – public or private – in this article, bar Greenwich, which is roughly on par. Seeing as Madison’s public schools are not known for producing materially different results than any of these other systems, the only remaining explanation for the increased costs here is decades of mismanagement.

Where this excess funding being wasted? Well, a lot of places, but we don’t have to look very hard to find the biggest piece: new construction, and the debt required to finance it.

None of the millions being spent on that line-item is actually necessary:

• If we look at the Country School, it uses a lot of the same buildings it used 40 years ago.
• OLM Prep is in the Island Avenue School, a building that was built in 1950. The town sold the school off to OLM for roughly the cost of a 2,500 square foot beach house on that same street.
• The school I attended back in the day still uses the same classroom buildings it built in 1914.
• Madison in the meantime is building an ultramodern brand spanking new elementary school, Neck River, at a cost of $70 million or so when it has three other schools (Jeffrey – const. 1957, Ryerson – const. 1966, and Academy – const. 1921) sitting empty. It would have four empty schools but for the fact that Island is now being used very effectively by a private school.
• This is only 22 years after it built its most recent hyper-expensive school, the new DHHS (2003).
• Academy, by being left to rot instead of being properly maintained and used, has become the most divisive and controversial fiscal boondoggle in town history. Maybe we should have just left it as an elementary school – seeing as we decommissioned four of them to build a new one.

The private schools keep their old infrastructure. Madison essentially sets all of its old infrastructure on fire on a rolling fifty-year schedule. I don’t know what arguments the public school system makes to the town to convince them that they need a new decamillion dollar building and need to throw out two or more old ones every twenty years or so, when the private schools seem to get by without throwing away their old buildings just fine.

The same principle is why the 1960s-era Saturn V rocket cost $1.5 billion per launch (inflation adjusted) while a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 costs a paltry $62 million today. If you have to throw away the rocket after every launch, your space travel will be prohibitively expensive.

If you want to know why our public school system spends $30,000 per student per year but doesn’t have the budget to keep your fourth grader’s music classes, this is why.

Assuming we could use infrastructure for longer than 70 years and then could resource schools on a continuing basis at OLM Prep or Xavier levels, this would be anywhere from 15% to 70% less expensive while delivering comparable results. With the evolution of AI over the next few years, that level of resourcing would likely be able to obtain superior results at even lower costs.

Or – even better – we could privatize the schools and turn the buildings into revenue drivers for the town by bringing in students from neighboring towns.

Regardless of how you look at it, it is possible to cut our tax bills in half while getting the same level of service delivery. All that is required is a change in approach.

So… why don’t we do that?