For members of the legislature’s Education Committee, the 2025 legislative session will bring back perennial debates over funding, classroom safety and teacher hiring and retention.
But this year, committee leaders have also pledged to make concerted efforts to address special education funding and services — costs that can account for as much as a quarter or more of some public school districts’ budgets.
Among the proposals the committee is considering is a change to the way Connecticut pays for special education that would add weight to the state’s “Education Cost Sharing” formula for districts that enroll higher numbers of students in special education programs. The proposed changes are similar to weighted funding that currently goes to districts with large populations of multilingual learners and students from low-income households.
This and other proposed reforms are based on the recommendations of a 14-member task force convened by statute in 2021 to study special education services in the state. The task force, which has been meeting monthly since spring 2023, included lawmakers, teachers, parents, school administrators, education department officials, specialists, advocates and others.
Educators and advocates say special education costs take up a large share of many districts’ budgets. The funds go toward everything from hiring specialized teachers, paraeducators and other support staff, to expenses associated with sending students with disabilities to non-district schools that can better meet their needs.
“We annually come up about $74 million short, and that’s $74 million that cities, towns and ultimately boards of education have to absorb in unreimbursed special education expenditures,” said Kate Dias, the president of the Connecticut Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the state.
“You look at who’s being impacted by the $74 million of unfunded special education costs and its communities that don’t have the ability to absorb that,” Dias said.
Namely, it’s Connecticut’s urban school districts. District leaders in Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven say between 20% and 30% of their budgets went toward special education expenditures in 2021-22, totaling between about $80 million up to $140 million. A majority of those expenditures were on tuition at private schools with programs designed for students with severe disabilities.
Rep. Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield, incoming co-chair of the Education Committee, said lawmakers intend to explore ways to tamp down on these costs — in some cases by encouraging districts to develop ways to offer specialized programming locally, rather than outsourcing those services.
“There’s lots of partnerships that some districts are already participating in for students with really acute mental health needs for example, that have essentially partnered with the district to offer some like therapeutic services in the district, which of course, brings the out-placement costs way down,” Leeper said. “So, we’re trying to find ways to help districts address those unique student needs in district.”
[RELATED: For CT parents, special ed meetings with schools are ‘a battlefield’]
Leeper is replacing former committee co-chair Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, who did not seek reelection. Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, will serve as Leeper’s co-chair.
The state Department of Education has put forward financial proposals to address the costs of special needs programming, including setting a tuition schedule for private special education services that would “assist [districts] to appropriately prepare for current and subsequent year tuition costs.”
The education department also proposed clarifications to existing laws, making each local district responsible for funding the “actual cost” of special education at choice schools, which includes magnet, charter or technical schools. The law currently requires districts to cover “reasonable costs.”
The department is requesting the clarification after a declaratory ruling at Brass City Charter School earlier this year that said school districts are responsible for reimbursing the “actual costs” to choice school programs that provide special education services.
As written in law, the families of students with disabilities are also required to be given an “informational handout” that explains what it means to have a student who requires an Individualized Education Program. The state Department of Education further proposed changing the requirement to instead offer “resources” and refer families to the Student Bill of Rights, which outlines that families are entitled to enroll their child in public education, regardless of immigration status, and receive translation services and important documents in their native language.
Teachers’ union agenda: ‘It’s time to invest’
Beyond special education funding, the teachers’ union has several proposals on its agenda this year that would also call for significant additional funding.
In recent years, Dias and union Vice President Joslyn DeLancey said the teachers sought changes that were programmatic and focused on improving the teaching profession. For example, the CEA lobbied for what’s known as “play-based learning,” for children in preschool and kindergarten, which is an educational approach that “emphasizes play in promoting learning and includes developmentally appropriate strategies that can be integrated with existing learning standards.”
The association also sought changes to the professional evaluation system that they found to be more supportive. Those efforts were successful, and not particularly costly, DeLancey said.
This year, that will shift.
“This session our real ask is — it’s time to invest,” DeLancey said. “We keep kicking the can down the road, and we keep seeing further and further consequences to the fact.”
Gov. Ned Lamont, in his State of the State Address last year, said his administration has made Connecticut’s “largest ever commitment” to K-12 education. And his administration said the current budget includes “historic levels” of funding.
But educators and municipal leaders have pushed back, saying while the actual amount of state funding may have reached a historic high, the state’s share of education funding, as a percentage, has actually decreased when inflation is factored in. As a result, districts are covering a larger portion of their education budgets, they say.
“Out of the gates, our education funding is substantially held back,” Dias said.
To correct for the shortfall would cost $500 million over the next two years, Dias estimates.
This year, the teacher’s union is also seeking to expand a program known as the Aspiring Educators Diversity Scholarship, which provides up to $10,000 to graduates of Connecticut’s lowest-performing districts (known as Alliance Districts) who enroll in training to become educators. CEA hopes to expand the opportunity beyond those who have graduated from Alliance Districts.
Sen. Eric Berthel, R-Watertown, and a ranking member on the Education Committee, wants to continue work on previous initiatives last year centered on funding accountability.
“I’m not saying that we should directly tie funding to the ability of your school system to produce … but right now, there’s a big, big void between money that we spend and the accountability for that money,” Berthel said.
“We have an opportunity to fix this,” he said. “It’s going to require us to make some difficult decisions and have some very candid and open discussions with our labor unions.”
Early childhood, charter schools, safety and standardized testing
Lawmakers say it’s not just that additional funding is needed, across myriad educational programs, but the committee needs to be thoughtful about how funding is allocated and the logistics of funding approvals.
Leeper said proposals before the committee will go beyond just K-12 funding — early childhood education also needs further consideration and investment.
“All the research says every dollar spent in early childhood is the best dollar you can spend, because you get the best bang for your buck,” Leeper said. “As often as we talk about K-12, I don’t want to lose sight of that early childhood part of it. We need to be thinking more connectedly and comprehensively about kids’ development and education through every age.”
The state Department of Education, meanwhile, has proposed changing the approval timeline for charter schools from annually to every other year to better align with the state’s biennial budget process.
Prior to 2015, a charter school could begin recruiting students and building its campus as soon as it received approval from the state Board of Education. That year, however, legislators changed the process to a two-tier approval, where the state Board of Education grants “initial” approval and lawmakers then determine whether to fund the school.
That slowed the approval and launch process for new charter schools, with many being held up at the legislature and waiting years to get funding. The latest proposal is an attempt to make the process run more smoothly, and potentially improve a school’s chances of getting funding, though it’s unclear whether it could delay some approvals.
Leeper also expects the committee to consider changes to mandated school safety drills and modifications to standardized testing in the state.
Last year, Leeper sought to pare back school safety drill requirements, but her proposal drew strong criticism, particularly from Rep. Mitch Bolinsky, R-Newtown, who said the legislation took “chances with the lives of children.”
The committee will reconsider drill requirements this year following the work of a task force — chaired by Leeper, Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, and Amery Bernhardt, director at the Center for School Safety and Crisis Preparation — which has identified some best practices.
“We don’t want to do anything that makes our Newtown friends feel like they could possibly be less safe,” Leeper said, acknowledging the trauma of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. But, she added, the drills themselves can often be distressing to children. “We have a responsibility to ensure all of our kids across the state are safe and not being traumatized by these practices,” she said.
As for standardized testing, Leeper said the committee will have a “unique opportunity” to consider changes based on the results of a school testing audit, expected in early January. “Annual testing, in my opinion, has been a failure every year. We learn the same things about our students and have not made any meaningful growth towards closing our opportunity gaps or achievement gaps,” Leeper said.
Leeper acknowledged the importance of transparency when it comes to student and school performance, but she said she’s not sure the current methods are working. The legislature will need to find “the right balance,” she said.
“The testing comes at a cost, both financial and in terms of time and in terms of driving what our students are learning,” she said. “If we have an opportunity to scale that back … I think that would be a step in the right direction.”