Sarra and Foran to Retire

The Consolidated School District of New Britain announced online today that Superintendent Nancy Sarra and Assistant Superintendent Michael Foran will retire.

“Tonight, after 65 years of combined service to the students and families of New Britain,” the school district said. “Superintendent Nancy Sarra and Assistant Superintendent Michael Foran announced their intent to retire at the end of this school year.”

“Superintendent Sarra,” commented, the school district said, “that she was proud of all the accomplishments the District has made toward the collective vision of pursuing excellence for all New Britain students.”

The school district added that, “Assistant Superintendent Foran noted that the opportunity to work with the amazing students that he has interacted with over the years has been extremely rewarding.”

After Republican Mayor Erin Stewart won the 2021 city election by a wide margin, carrying in not only a 12 to 3 Republican majority on the City Council but also all three Republican candidates for Board of Education, there has been speculation about the future of Sarra’s leadership of the school district.

Stewart has developed a reputation of antagonism toward both school funding and the school system’s professional educators. In 2021, Stewart had said that, “what I will not do is blindly throw additional tax dollars into a massive bureaucracy that is failing our students,” as a reason for again freezing city funding for city schools. But Stewart’s critics say that it is Stewart’s own policies of routinely freezing local annual operating funding for the city’s schools that is harmful to educational opportunity in the city.

Critics also accuse Stewart of pressing for more power in the running of school district, even going so far as to squeeze a longtime Republican Party regular from the school board who some say had not towed Stewart’s Republican party line to her satisfaction.

Sarra became superintendent of the New Britain school system in 2016, when the school system had said that, before being named superintendent, she worked in the school district for two decades as a teacher, Principal of Jefferson Elementary School and then in the school district system office. The school system said at that time that she has degrees from Central Connecticut State University and University of Connecticut.