Lawsuit creates paperwork headache for New London, Waterford, Norwich schools

Norwich, New London and Waterford school officials are scrambling to respond to an "onerous" subpoena from the state Attorney General's office seeking documents dating back 10 years in response to a lawsuit challenging the state's education funding.

The Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF), representing school districts, parents and education advocates, is suing the state for more equitable education funding. The coalition complained Monday that the state Attorney General's office has subpoenaed "massive and unprecedented" amounts of paperwork and background documents from 10 member school districts for the court case.

Locally, New London, Norwich and Waterford school districts, all members of the coalition and plaintiffs in the lawsuit, received the subpoenas for documents dating back to 2002 that must be submitted within 30 days of receiving the subpoena.

Heavy burden

Dianne Kaplan deVries, CCJEF project director, said the subpoenas will place unreasonable burdens on municipal school districts at a time when they have reduced central office staff and are trying to prepare their 2012-13 budgets.

DeVries said the identical subpoenas asked for 46 different pieces of information, about two-thirds of which is required to be reported to the state Department of Education annually. She called it an "extraordinarily costly duplication" for understaffed local districts.

"No district could be expected to comply with such an enormously onerous production order," deVries said.

Perry Zinn-Rowthorn, associate attorney general for litigation, in a statement countered that CCJEF and its members have filed a lawsuit against the state that is "unprecedented and far-reaching," alleging that the state has failed to provide adequate education and seeking court orders to dramatically expand the state's financial support of local education.

Because the lawsuit is broad and touches on all aspects of school administration, and potentially could be very costly to taxpayers, the Attorney General's defense on behalf of the state must also be broad-based, Zinn-Rowthorn said.

Norwich Superintendent Abby Dolliver said the subpoena requested "an array of documents" including budgets for the past 10 years, grant applications, teacher handbooks, curriculum information and information about technology. Norwich received the subpoena Jan. 23, and the information is due by Feb. 21.

"We don't have a lot of it, and certainly don't have easy access to records from 2002," Dolliver said. "We would have to search for them (in filing cabinets), copy them and make them available. It would take someone weeks to put all this together."

New London Superintendent Nicholas Fischer estimated the subpoena would require at least 1,000 hours of secretarial staff work and another 200 to 300 hours of administrative time. Fischer said the city, which received the subpoena about a week ago, also cannot seek reimbursement from the Attorney General's office for the copies.

Waterford Superintendent Jerome Belair said he received the subpoena late Friday and has just begun to sort through it. Belair questioned how some of the requested documents even pertain to equitable education funding. For example, the subpoena asked for a roster of all the people who have applied to positions in the Waterford school district over the past 10 years, how many vacant positions the district has had and how many of those positions were filled.

Even though many school records are computerized, Belair said a lot of the information requested wouldn't be on computers.

Belair said he plans to speak to Waterford state legislators about the subpoena.

Other CCJEF member school districts that received the subpoenas were Bridgeport, Danbury, Hartford, New Britain, Plainfield, Stamford and Windham.

CCJEF first filed the suit, CCJEF v. Rell, in 2005 claiming schoolchildren's state constitutional rights were being violated because they were not receiving suitable and equitable educational opportunities based on the current funding system. The suit progressed to the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled in March 2010 that the group could sue the state based on the constitutionality of education funding.

The case is expected to be tried in Hartford Superior Court starting in July 2014. The subpoenas to towns are part of the early discovery phase of the trial.

DeVries said the coalition hopes to avoid a trial by reaching a settlement with the state that would adequately fund education for districts with a mandated time frame for implementing the new plan.

Zinn-Rowthorn said CCJEF has resisted the state's attempt to ask the court to narrow the scope of the lawsuit and also refused to delay the lawsuit to work on education funding reforms through state legislation.

"Instead, CCJEF has chosen to continue actively litigating against the state, while demanding that we abandon our responsibility to vigorously defend the State in court," Zinn-Rowthorn said in a statement. "As in any case, we remain open to discussing measures to limit discovery and believe that such discussions are best conducted among counsel and the court, rather than through the press."

c.bessette@theday.com