Danbury City Council Approves Career Academy

With the severe overcrowding in Danbury Schools, the City Council said yes to approve the $99 Million Career Academy.

It's a move to not only add more classrooms, but to ease the burden on other Danbury schools which have been operating at more then full capacity for the last few years. The amount of students has made it even tougher to re-open schools full time since it's almost impossible to abide by the current CDC guidelines for spacing in the classroom.

Get our free mobile app

According to newstimes.com Danbury Superintendent Sal Pascarella was very happy with the vote.

It’s a win for our youngsters and not only for the town, but education as a whole for the state as a model. The school would be the first of its kind in Connecticut. God, I’m so happy and so proud.

The City Council vote was unanimous, however they will move ahead with the project without a June 15 referendum. Danbury Mayor Joe Cavo is hesitant to safely have a referendum due to the pandemic, citing the Danbury cases are up and down, and not knowing how cases would look by the 15th of June.

The Mayor did tell me a few weeks back that he credits former Mayor Mark Boughton with the idea for the Academy, and he got the wheels in motion.

"Well under former Mayor Mark Boughton, he created the idea for the academy to deal with school expansion, and with the economy being so good over the last few years, Danbury was growing. With that growth comes people that move here to access jobs and with those people come children. We have a responsibility to educate those children and we're forecasting the numbers to continue to grow. So the Mayor had the idea for a 1200 seat Career Academy which would be located at the Summit in Danbury (formally the Matrix). The great part about this whole deal is that the Mayor was able to get a commitment from the State of Connecticut for a reimbursement of eighty percent of the money we spend to build the Career Academy".

When it opens, the Career Academy will host Danbury middle and high school students.