The 2015 Question
The Leadership Failure Behind the $42.8M School Bond
A $42.8 million municipal crisis does not simply arrive in the mail one morning. It is not an act of God, nor is it the result of a sudden, unforeseeable natural disaster. A bill of this magnitude is cultivated. It is the mathematical harvest of nearly a decade of deferred maintenance, kicked cans, and an astonishing failure of administrative leadership.
As the taxpayers of Sherman are asked to swallow a staggering, generational debt to renovate the Pre-K through 8th Grade elementary school, the civic conversation has remained remarkably polite. Residents are debating the architectural merits of the renovation, the impact of borrowing interest rates, and the demographic shifts of the student body.
But it is time to stop looking at the blueprints, and start looking at the architects of the crisis.
The Architecture of Decay
The physical deterioration of the Sherman School has been an open secret for the better part of a decade. The failing roof, the exhausted HVAC systems, and the crumbling subterranean infrastructure did not suddenly expire in the last twelve months. The warning signs, the structural reports, and the pleas for intervention have been quietly accumulating on municipal desks since at least 2015.
During the vast majority of this critical decade of decay, Don Lowe has served as Sherman’s First Selectman. As the paid, professional chief executive of the town, he occupies the seat where the buck ultimately stops. While a volunteer Board of Education openly bypassed basic repairs—dreaming instead of a shiny, comprehensive new campus—the town’s most vital and expensive municipal asset was rotting from the inside out. And the Office of the First Selectman remained effectively paralyzed.
When you align the timeline of the school's deterioration with the tenure of the current administration, an uncomfortable reality emerges. It presents a logical dilemma that leaves the town's highest office entirely without a defensible narrative.
An Inescapable Conclusion
When examining how a manageable municipal repair metastasized into a $42.8 million emergency, any reasonable observer is forced into a philosophical corner. There are, ultimately, only two ways to interpret the administration's handling of the Sherman School.
The first possibility is that the First Selectman was oblivious. In this scenario, the chief executive of the town sat at the highest desk in Town Hall for years and remained entirely blind to the fact that a massive, publicly funded facility was physically collapsing just up the road, and that the volunteer board overseeing it was fundamentally mismanaging its maintenance. If this is true, it reveals a profound administrative blindness—a staggering level of managerial incompetence.
The second possibility is that the First Selectman knew exactly what was happening, and lacked the political spine to stop it. In this scenario, the administration watched the volunteer Board of Education actively defer maintenance to force a crisis. The First Selectman saw the $42.8 million train coming, briefly panicked, and then simply capitulated, rubber-stamping the financial ruin of his own constituents rather than telling a volunteer board "no." If this is true, it represents an act of cowardly, catastrophic administrative neglect.
The Incompetence Tax
He was either asleep at the wheel, or he handed the keys to the people driving the town off a cliff. For the taxpayers of Sherman, the distinction is entirely academic. Whether the root cause was executive apathy or political cowardice, the result is exactly the same: The town is now forced to pay the ultimate Incompetence Tax.
In the private sector, accountability for this kind of oversight is swift. If a corporate chief executive allowed a flagship asset to quietly degrade into a $42.8 million liability under their watch because they couldn't manage their own subordinate committees, the board of directors would terminate them immediately. They certainly would not be handed a blank check and asked to oversee the rebuild.
The Sherman School bond is no longer just a referendum on construction costs. It is a towering, $42.8 million monument to an era of failed leadership. Before the town writes the check, the voters must ask themselves a quiet, devastating question: Can we afford to entrust the solution to the very people who authored the crisis?