Some Connecticut lawmakers are raising concerns about oversight of public school funding and said they plan to push for several education reforms after The Connecticut Mirror published an investigation about a Hartford student with a disability who alleges she graduated without the ability to read or write.
Bipartisan leaders of the state legislature’s Education Committee said the CT Mirror’s story illustrated a “broken system” that they were aware of “anecdotally.”
“This is not the first time that we’ve heard about some of these atrocities that are going on” across school districts in Connecticut, said Sen. Eric Berthel, R-Watertown, who serves as a ranking member on the Education Committee.
Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, the Senate co-chair of the committee and a former Hartford educator, said he had heard about students being “pushed through the system many of times,” but never to the point that a student had graduated high school without literacy skills.
“It’s a complete breakdown of the system, period,” McCrory said. “There is a bigger issue of how we prepare educators to go in and work with kids, how we change policies, how we credential individuals to go on to work with these populations because this was a complete failure all the way around. It wasn’t just a teacher or two teachers, it was a complete failure of the entire system.”
While raising issues with the Connecticut school system, both lawmakers also cited ongoing concerns about how money is being spent by districts.
Berthel also issued a joint statement with state Sen. Lisa Seminara, ranking member of the Committee on Children, and Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, both also Republicans, shortly after the story ran.
“Aleysha Ortiz’s story is a scathing indictment of Connecticut’s education system. As policymakers, we must examine every part of this story and how the system failed Aleysha in so many ways,” the lawmakers said in the statement. “Tens of thousands of dollars a year are spent per student in the Hartford Public Schools. The vast majority of that money is subsidized by taxpayers from across Connecticut. … Aleysha Ortiz’s unimaginable story is Hartford’s — and Connecticut’s — reality. Her story must be a blaring alarm bell for anyone who cares about the education of Connecticut’s children.”
Last year, Senate Democratic lawmakers, in particular, advocated for more transparency in educational spending — arguing that despite a requirement for schools to report their spending to the Connecticut Department of Education, the categories often lack detail, which “makes it difficult to compare the spending practices of school districts, even if they are similarly sized.”
The passage of Senate Bill 1 in 2023 has required the state Department of Education to begin annually publishing each school district’s receipts, expenditures and statistics on its website, whereas by 2025, the department will also need to develop and publish the data in a format “that allows financial comparisons between school districts and schools,” according to the legislation.
But lawmakers and other education advocates question whether that’s enough.
The School and State Finance Project, a Connecticut-based nonprofit policy organization, has advocated for further development of the 2023 legislation, where all school systems would move to some type of “uniform chart of accounts.”
“One of the reasons why there’s been pushback is on the administrative burden it may cause on districts to be able to switch over to a system that is different than what they’re currently using now,” said Michael Morton, the deputy executive director for communications and operations at the School and State Finance Project. “But when you don’t have something uniform, it’s very hard to compare spending. It’s very hard to compare where resources are going.”
Another proposal that’s been presented before would require some type of spending outline before a funding increase is allocated to a district.
“If there’s areas that [the legislature would] want to make sure that [Educational Cost Sharing] increases go to, they could specify that in statute — that whatever amount of funding a district receives over ‘X’ amount of time, or over their grant from a certain year needs to go to X, Y and Z priorities,” Morton said.
And that’s something McCrory is seriously considering.
“Next legislative session, we have to be conscious of how we spend our resources,” McCrory said. “So when a school district asks for ‘X’ amount of millions of dollars, the question is going to have to be ‘What are you gonna do with it?’”
But, Berthel said he thinks Ortiz’s story shows more drastic steps are needed.
“We’re at a point where someone besides the people who are running Hartford Public Schools need to be in charge of that school system,” he said.
“My call to action is we have to fix what’s broken in Hartford Public Schools, so that these kids come out of their high schools with a diploma, and they’ve actually earned it, and they meet the standards,” Berthel said, also raising broad criticisms about how urban school districts across the state are managed.
“Just about every year that I’ve been on [the Education Committee], we continue to address cries and demands for more funding,” Berthel said. “It’s largely those big inner-city schools that we get continuous cries for help, and the issue becomes that we never see a change. We don’t see any change in outcomes. We don’t see things getting better as a result of that funding, so what are we paying for?”
The state funds about $2.8 billion annually on special education services for districts, and for some towns those costs make up a significant portion of their budgets.
In Hartford, which is home to one of the largest populations of students with disabilities in the state, nearly 31% of the total expenditures in 2022-23, or about $139.2 million, went toward special education for things like teacher salaries, transportation or outsourcing to other schools if the district can’t meet the students’ needs.
Deborah Zimmerman Herz, a spokesperson for the Hartford school district, said their ability to “provide these learning experiences is dependent on available resources.”
“Like similar districts, Hartford Public Schools has faced staffing shortages of special education teachers and other certified student support staff for years. Despite these challenges, we remain committed to doing the best we can with the resources available to us,” Zimmerman Herz said. “Hartford Public Schools has the highest concentration of need of any district in the state of Connecticut and our students deserve a high-quality education along with every student in the state. The suggestion that we have more than enough resources to meet the growing needs of our students is a disservice to our educators, and at odds with the facts.”
In Connecticut, urban hubs have been historically underserved and underfunded, and despite a district like Hartford Public Schools spending about $21,000 per pupil — it’s a difficult comparison to a district like Avon (which spends a similar amount per student) because of the difference in overall student population and the different concentration of high-needs students.
“If you’re comparing Hartford to a wealthy district with relatively low student needs, that’s not an accurate comparison,” Morton said. “It requires much greater funding for a student who is economically disadvantaged, who is a multilingual learner, to achieve at the same level as their non-need peers. They’re going to require additional funding. … What that means is we need to meet students where they’re at and making sure that we’re getting the resources to them that they need.”
In 2022-23, Hartford Public Schools’ student population was made up of 24% English language learners, 79% qualified for free or reduced lunch and over 20% identified as a student with a disability.
“The solution is not the extreme of taking away funding, and at the same time, it’s not the other extreme, which is, ‘Let’s forget about accountability and make a district’s per student spending to be like $80,000.’ No one’s calling for that,” Morton said. “There needs to be a conversation of what happened [to the graduate who can’t read,] and how do we make sure that this doesn’t happen again? Is the district under resourced? … How do we make sure that need is being addressed from a funding standpoint, while also ensuring that funds are being spent transparently and that there is some accountability measures to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
One accountability measure is playing out between the state Department of Education and Hartford Public Schools now. Across the country earlier this year school districts prepared their school budgets for a fiscal cliff as federal pandemic relief expired in late September. Hartford made headlines for a $37 million deficit entering the 2024-25 school year.
In May, Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez told the CT Mirror the deficit was because of a number of factors, including “flat stagnant funding [from the city], … the school choice ecosystem, … declining enrollment, … the higher concentration of need that exists in communities that have been under-resourced, … [and the increase of] our special education rates.”
Regardless, the state Board of Education ultimately approved for the Department of Education to “assess” Hartford’s finances, with a close look at their spending on magnet schools and special education and where else the district can make improvements of its financial systems.
Findings thus far have been limited.
At the state Board of Education’s September meeting, Keith Norton, the education department’s chief strategic planning officer, said an assessment into magnet school funds was just beginning with “looking at hundreds and hundreds of documents” and on-site interviews scheduled for that month.
The education department was also beginning to contract with “an education consultant” to “make sure that HPS is complying with all applicable federal and state laws with regard to providing services to students with disabilities,” Norton said.
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