Since Hartford Public Schools does not have a Chief Financial Officer, Deputy Superintendent Paul Foster has been cooking the books for HPS since last June when CFO Phillip Penn left for greener pastures, Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez has not had an official member of her cabinet to trot out official rhetorical puff pieces on the budget to the local media, leaving her alone to stand outside Dunkin’ Donuts asking for change.

To promote and protect the district narrative of a funding apocalypse, board member Phillip Rigueur, joined by Local 566 Union leader John Walton and Hartford Parent University Executive Director Milly Arciniegas, recently sent a letter to the Hartford Courant deflecting district and BOE responsibility for HPS’ current budget woes (read the story here).  The Courant referred to the three as “school officials,” despite Arciniegas’ connection to HPS coming only as the director of another non-profit (Hartford Parent University) schlepping the district for available state and federal funds while, according to the non-profit’s 2021 tax filing, pocketing 20% of the non-profit’s annual revenue for compensation.

Suddenly, after four years of standing by and, along with the other four ill-conceived BOE appointments by former Mayor Bronin, approving every budget and approving every service contract offered up by Torres-Rodriguez without asking for proof of effective spending, board member Phillip Rigueur stated in an interview with the Hartford Courant that since he is now an “MBA from MIT” (seriously, he told the Courant this, I bet he had a bumper sticker printed for his parents’ vehicle which reads, “My child attended MIT!”), it is a “perfect time to make people aware of the reality of Hartford Public Schools” (hell, I do that every week!), it is now time for him, so he states, to be “fiscally responsible.”  Not when HPS had $155 million which they knew was a one-time deal and everybody was fat, dumb, and happy, but now, after approving the spending of every penny of that windfall and after causing great anxiety across the rolls of HPS school staff.

Rigueur told the Courant that “never in his tenure has the board made a public plea for more funding.”  Well, since his “tenure” began with the onslaught of COVID, from which HPS’ was given $155 million in free money from Uncle Joe, there wasn’t a need for his making a “public plea for more funding.”  It appears Rigueur has “tenure” issues.  As of this morning, his LinkedIn account says that he has been on the BOE since 2017.  Here is a document showing that Rigueur joined the BOE in November of 2019.  Apparently, the MBA program at MIT didn’t include a course on the effective and honest use of the calendar.

The three “school officials” stated in their letter that HPS’ underfunded budget is “a continuation of historic patterns of systemic inequities.”  And where have you been throughout this “historic pattern?”  However, Rigueur tells the Courant that in 2019-20, the “level of student need was significantly less than we have experienced during and since the pandemic.”  So funding was righteous in 2019-20?  Does four years of supposed underfunding make it a “historic pattern?”

The “school officials” state in their letter that they are “requesting” (the Courant said they are “demanding”) another $9 million from the city, despite Rigueur saying the district needs another $19 million to match the per pupil spending of 2019-20.  $9 million?  Hmmm.  Will Rigueur vote “Nay” at Tuesday’s (April 16th) BOE meeting where Torres-Rodriguez is asking for more than $6 million to pay five outside companies who are supplying traveling school staff to HPS while HPS cuts those same positions from their staff rolls (“The Privatization of School Staff”)?  Will he vote for the 2024-25 budget which cuts those rolls, while at the same time asking “all residents in the city…and in the Greater Hartford area” to “consider and reflect” on HPS’ funding?   He did this in a follow-up Op-Ed to his Courant letter, a piece of rhetorical trash which the AI checker GPTZero found that likely 43% of which was created by AI.

As an “MBA from MIT,” Rigueur must understand that things like tuition are part of the cost of doing business for a school district.  Yet in his Courant pieces, he would like to figure the cost of the district’s per pupil spending by taking out that expense.  From this math, he reports that today HPS is spending 6% less than what they were spending per pupil in 2019-20, but if they had more, they’d spend more.  Well, since Rigueur brought “reality” into the mix, looking at the total reality of per pupil spending, according to EdSight, “Connecticut’s official source for education data,” we find that HPS’ per pupil spending has increased nearly 22% between the school year 2019-20 and 2022-23, while statewide that number has increased 16% and HPS outspends the average school district in Connecticut by more than $1,000 per pupil.  

And while Rigueur goes on to write that “Firstly, state governments (yes, he wrote the plural, “governments,” must have been the AI) must step in to mitigate the disparities caused by local funding,”  the state government of Connecticut, says EdSight, funds 61% of HPS’ budget, while the average school district’s budget in Connecticut is funded by the state at a rate of 29%.  And, he doesn’t tell you that Public Act 23-160 (effective July, 2023) reinstates a ban on Sheff magnet schools charging tuition to sending school districts (except that Hartford may still charge tuition to other districts sending students to Great Path Academy). Nor does he mention that in 2025, magnet schools outside of the Sheff zone who may be charging tuition to HPS, cannot charge more than 58% of what was paid the previous year, a definite cost savings for HPS (Public Act 23-204). 

While HPS leadership and erstwhile minions bemoan the damnation of tuition payments, they ought to take note of the fact that, according to EdSight, HPS received 2% of their total revenue from tuition payments, while the average district barely passes the 1% mark.

What nobody from the district wants to talk about is the effectiveness of the spending which HPS has been doing over the past 8 years under Torres-Rodriguez, the past 3+ under board member Rigueur and the rest of Bronin’s appointments whom we should have never been introduced to in the first place; where does HPS stand academically?  That is correct, I’ll turn to EdSight once again which finds that across the state, and across Alliance districts (districts that look like Hartford), HPS has received as much bang for their buck as Robert Kraft did at a Florida massage parlor.

Fortunately, it doesn’t appear Hartford’s new leadership team is buying any of this.  The Courant’s story on the letter by the three Amigos stated that Cristian Corza, Mayor Arulampalam’s new “Chief of space” (that’s what the Courant wrote), “offered no hope that the city would respond to the officials’ request,” insinuating instead that HPS should look toward their own “structural holes” and inadequate “investments.”

No, Rigueur is a day late and, literally, a dollar short in his attempt to suddenly put on big boy pants and play the BOE community advocate, or the “fiscally responsible” adult in the room.  He gave up this right when for nearly four years he has neglected his duty as a BOE member to practice effective oversight on the Superintendent’s policies and practices, creating the need for real community advocates to run a blitz for his removal under the City Charter, Chapter 4, Section 3-A, and/or Chapter VII, Section 1(e).