Gillian Peihe Feng, Contributing Photographer

The New Haven Board of Education on Monday discussed a report which found that the school district spends $1.70 per square foot on district buildings — a figure that is between roughly 38 percent and 57 percent of the nationally recommended $3 to $4.50 and between 43 percent to 49 percent of what other school districts in suburban Connecticut spend on maintenance: on average, between $3.50 and $4.

The report, first presented to the Board of Education’s finance and operations committee last week by Chief of School Operations Paul Whyte ’93, offers a closer look at the district’s funding shortfalls, which district leaders have cited in their responses to complaints about deteriorating school facilities, unmet repair requests and other maintenance issues throughout NHPS. 

“Good intentions don’t fix roofs,” Matt Wilcox, the chair of the finance and operations committee, said at the board meeting. “The funding to hire people to fix roofs is necessary.”

The funding shortfalls account for long-standing complaints about facilities in NHPS, Wilcox said.

“When there’s questions about, ‘why is a roof leaking,’ ‘why is an air conditioning system not working correctly,’ one of the reasons behind that is the fact that we are only able to fund about half of what is recommended and about half of what is the average in Connecticut,” Wilcox said at the meeting.

The report indicates that the district is spending $1.70 on facilities maintenance and operations per each square foot of the schools and buildings it manages, totaling $7,228,906. In order to meet the recommended range — provided by the Association of School Business Officials — the district would need to spend another $5,527,986. To reach the “regional average” identified in the report, they would have to spend $11,906,434.

Poor maintenance in public schools has long been an issue in New Haven. Wilbur Cross High School, the largest comprehensive high school in the city, had facilities maintenance issues last year, ranging from mold spores in the library to underrepaired roofs. 

The New Haven Federation of Teachers, the local teachers’ union, has made consistent efforts to address this funding gap, including by demanding greater budget transparency from the school district.

Leslie Blatteau ’97 GRD ’07, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said in an interview after the board meeting that the report’s numbers were “not a surprise.” She noted that state-level advocacy would be necessary to “address the reality of the ‘two Connecticuts,’” referring to the gap between the state’s wealthier suburban areas and poorer urban communities. 

Blatteau added that additional funding from the city, redistributed school district budget funds, as well as an increased contribution from Yale are all part of the solution to a more fully-funded district.

“Yes, there’s two Connecticuts, but there’s also two New Havens,” Blatteau said in an interview after the board meeting. “There’s Yale that can fund any and every whim, and then there’s New Haven Public Schools that’s always operating at a financial deficit, and that hurts our kids.”

Yale has established initiatives to support public education in New Haven, including educational programs for students and teachers. Yale will pay a total of $135 million to New Haven, as part of a six-year deal that began in 2021. 

Since the spring, the school district has chipped away at mitigating a $23.2 million budget deficit for its 2025-2026 fiscal year.

City and district leaders have repeatedly argued that the school system needs increased state support to fully address the district’s needs, including its facilities problems. NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon said after Monday’s meeting that the district depends in large part on state grant funding to handle major maintenance concerns. 

“The district has never had the resources to do regular, ongoing preventive maintenance,” Harmon said in an interview last month. “So what has happened is that, in many instances, systems fail, and that that’s when they get addressed, which is, you know, a very inefficient approach, but it’s what we’ve been able to do with the available resources.”

New Haven Public Schools’ fiscal year 2025-2026 budget is $331,604,621.