When he sat down to write his annual back-to-school staff letter, Brunswick Superintendent of Schools Paul Perzanoski was a frustrated man.

He’d had enough of continuous state funding shortfalls. Enough of teachers being asked to handle ever-increasing social and emotional responsibilities of students, and then being criticized for not doing it well enough.

The resulting letter to staff and faculty, dated Aug. 17, contained sharp criticism of both Gov. Paul LePage’s behavior, as well as LePage’s disparaging comments about the quality of Maine’s public schools. It also satirized politically conservative school reformers in the state Legislature who claim publicly funded schools are inadequate and want to use tax dollars to fund private, religious and charter schools instead.

Six days later, Gov. LePage’s spokeswoman, Adrienne Bennett, fired back. She described the letter as a “wildly inappropriate” forum for airing grievances with the governor.

Now, Perzanoski has apologized, sort of.

In a statement released this morning to The Times Record, Perzanoski apologized for using the back-toschool letter as a format for his grievances.

“The right to express myself appears to be a different issue than the forum used to do it,” the statement reads. “I will sincerely apologize to the Brunswick community and the Governor, yet I will continue to stand behind the message of my letter and interview.”

Underlying the superintendent’s frustration are matters of money, morale and accountability.

“My frame of mind was to support public education and my staff,” Perzanoski said this morning. “It was time to speak up, that enough is enough.”

Since the 1970s, Perzanoski said, educators increasingly have been asked to be more than teachers. They now function as psychiatrists, doctors, mentors, social workers, baby sitters, surrogate parents and body guards. Through that same period, he added, public funding for education has been divided and diverted into more and more specialized fields so that, in effect, schools have less money to work with than ever.

The clamp on funding gets even tighter when the exponential increase of students with disabilities or special needs are factored in, which makes allocation of state and federal funds even more important — and absent, Perzanoski said.

“State mandate is to pay 55 percent of public education,” he said, “but the state government has never lived up to that.”

Brunswick’s current state funding level for 2012-13 is 33 percent — and will be continue to drop due to the closure of the naval air station.

Perzanoski sees yet another problem looming with charter schools. Just as municipal school boards wrestle every year with the ambiguities of state revenue when assembling local their school budgets, communities which host charter schools have to make up the difference when their budgets fall short.

“I’m a proponent of school choice, but there has to be a state mechanism for funding them,” he said. “There has to be a way for us to buffer the issues so that our teachers can concentrate on the most important issues, which is to educate our students.”

Jim Grant, chairman of the Brunswick School Board, would not comment on whether disciplinary action would be taken or further apologies requested when the board meets on Sept. 12.

Neither would Grant reveal whether he agreed with the opinions Perzanoski expressed in the letter.

“My views are not important,” he said. “Those are his views and he has the right to express them.”

When told of Perzanoski’s statement, Grant concurred.

“I believe this is a positive step forward,” he said. “The board did not initiate the comments, the superintendent was not speaking as a member of the board when he made them.”

jtleonard@timesrecord.com

Public statement

¦ THE FOLLOWING public statement was issued to The Times Record today by Brunswick Superintendent of Schools Paul Perzanoski:

Over the course of this week many Superintendents in the State of Maine will be addressing their staff about current issues facing public education in their convocation addresses. Some of the topics will probably be improving student achievement, bullying, public education bashing, staff morale, charter schools and the restraint/seclusion mandate. One school department will be dealing with a $350,000 to $500,000 deficit to pay for students to attend charter schools.

The text of these speeches will probably not reach the media because there will be no media present. I placed my concerns in writing, in a letter to staff which had very different ramifications. The right to express myself appears to be a different issue than the forum used to do it. I will sincerely apologize for using the “Back to School” format to the Brunswick community and the Govenor, yet I will continue to stand behind the message of my letter and interview. Support of public education and the staff that work within it will be voiced through personal letters, appearances and my professional organizations.

Students should come first as we work through reform in public education. We understand this and embrace it, which is why we use data driven decision making to improve student achievement. Recently we have begun to see improvement as evidenced by the last three years of achievement scores.

Education has always been the great equalizer in America and it is more important than ever to keep it that way.

Sincerely,

Paul Perzanoski

Superintendent Brunswick School System

Aug. 28, 2012