The views stated here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors of this newspaper. We welcome supporting or opposing views on any published item. Received September 21, 2026.
Haddam-Killingworth High School serves 465 students this year, a number that has been declining for years, with no evidence the trend will reverse. Yet on September 24, 2026 taxpayers in Haddam and Killingworth are being asked to approve $151.9 million in renovations, with a local share of $77.2 million. Much of that cost goes toward preserving facilities sized for a student population the District no longer has.
Many voters don’t realize the State of Connecticut has already flagged HKHS as oversized for its enrollment. State school construction reimbursement is tied to a formula based on square feet per pupil. Reporting on a July 2024 RSD17 Board of Education meeting noted that “the state considers our schools oversized based on our student enrollment,” and that “this requires the District to apply for a waiver to get the reimbursement percentage for renovations.” In other words, under the state’s own formula, HKHS would not qualify for full reimbursement at its current size. The district needed special permission to keep the building this big.
And the waiver wasn’t sought to improve classrooms or labs. RSD17’s own project materials describe it plainly: the space waiver is what “allows us to retain features such as our Tech Ed., Auditorium, Fieldhouse, and Pool, while fully supporting academic needs.” The District says keeping these spaces doesn’t come at the expense of academics. Maybe so, but that’s a different question from whether a 465-student high school needs them in the first place. A field house, a competition pool, and a full auditorium are not what the state’s per-pupil formula was built around. They’re what’s left over from a much larger school.
That’s not speculation about the building’s age — it’s the District’s own description. RSD17 has stated that three of its four school buildings are more than fifty years old. HKHS was designed for an era of larger regional enrollment and a different model of vocational education. Renovating it at its current footprint doesn’t just fix aging infrastructure. It re-commits the District to carrying that older, bigger footprint forward for another fifty years.
That distinction matters because of how the money keeps flowing after the ribbon-cutting. Once a building exists, its operating costs — heating, staffing, maintenance, insurance — scale with square footage, not with how many students are enrolled. If HKHS enrollment keeps falling the way it has, taxpayers won’t just be paying off a $77.2 million bond. They’ll be paying, year after year, to operate a pool, a field house, and an auditorium sized for a school considerably larger than the one we actually have.
There’s a real argument to be made that a shared pool and field house benefit the wider Haddam-Killingworth community, not just students — RSD17’s own materials make exactly that case, noting these facilities also serve “the broader Haddam-Killingworth community” and neighboring towns whose teams use them. That may well be true, and it may be worth funding. But if that’s the real justification, it should be presented to voters as what it is: a community recreation facility, funded and debated on those terms — not folded into a school construction bond where it inflates the project’s size and cost under the heading of education.
The fact that HKHS needs improvement doesn’t change the fact that ADA compliance, Title IX compliance, and the outdated building systems are genuine and well-documented issues which should be addressed. However, the aim of repairing the existing problems is quite different from the objective of preserving every square foot that the state allows us to keep. The voters who will be voting on 24 September should know exactly what the $151.9 million is actually being spent on.
I will vote No — not because HKHS doesn’t need work, but because this plan asks us to pay for a building sized to yesterday’s enrollment and yesterday’s assumptions, not tomorrow’s reality.
GM Huff, Killingworth
