FAIRFIELD — The town’s Board of Education cut 11 STEAM elementary school teaching positions this week even after a handful of parents and students pleaded to maintain the positions.
But the cut was offset by the addition of seven new positions: three math resource teachers and four teachers for the district’s gifted program.
The net loss of four full-time equivalent positions helped close a $2 million budget cut in the 2026-27 budget plan made by the Fairfield Board of Selectpersons in March that was supported by the Representative Town Meeting this week.
The Board of Education approved a number of budget amendments during a meeting Tuesday night to account for the $2 million gap. The final vote was 5-3-1, with board members Kathrynanne Flynn, Jennifer Jacobsen and Kristin O’Neill voting against the list of reappropriations and member David Krasnoff abstaining.
Most of the people who spoke during the public comment portion of the Tuesday meeting argued that the loss of STEAM teachers would have a negative effect on students. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.
“Elementary school is a time where kids have a natural curiosity,” resident Michaela Chatel said. “It is a time where they are excited to learn and experiment and STEAM brings that to life.”
Superintendent Michael Testani said that most of the former STEAM teachers would be placed into one of those seven new positions and the remaining four would become elementary school teachers, meaning none would lose their jobs.
Further, Testani argued that the reduction in STEAM teachers is part of a larger plan that would create more time for science instruction than in years past due to a major overhaul of primary school schedules across the district.
“We’re just making dedicated time for science and social studies, which has been one of the two of the subject areas that have been neglected as a result of lost minutes,” he said during the Tuesday night meeting.
Lost minutes is the description for curriculum that exceeds the hours of a school day and is not taught to students.
Testani used the example of science kits that are delivered to every elementary classroom for teachers to use for hands-on instruction.
“They are vastly returned across the district untouched because there is not enough time in many of the classrooms,” he said of the kits.
The new schedule would provide for more science, not less, Testani said.
“We just want the existing science curriculum taught with fidelity across all our classrooms,” he said.
Local school officials have been working for months to revise the schedule for the town’s 11 elementary schools. The core subjects of English, math and science would stay the same from day to day but a list of specials — such as art, Spanish, music and physical education — would rotate.
The impetus for the schedule change is that elementary schools have been tasked with delivering curriculum that exceeds the hours of a school day, according to a March presentation by Chief Academic Officer James Zavodjancik.
One of the challenges of the current schedule is that some blocks of instruction can be condensed into just a few minutes to make room for instruction in a different subject.
At the March meeting, Zavodjancik gave an example of a writing block from 9:15 to 9:55 a.m. that is cut to 10 minutes on a certain day when Spanish is taught from 9:20 to 9:50 a.m.
Also at the March meeting, Zavodjancik presented data that showed that student achievement in Fairfield has been relatively stagnant for several years at the elementary school level.
Since the 2016-17 school year, the percentage of students who met or exceeded academic standards in English in Connecticut’s Smarter Balanced Assessment has been between 70% and 78%. During that same stretch, between 66% and 72.5% of students have at least met academic benchmarks in math.
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