Education stakeholders — including lawmakers, superintendents and municipal leaders — gathered Thursday to call out Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration for a lack of financial investment in K-12 education and to urge state leadership to make it a priority in the upcoming 2024 legislative session.
“We have reached a breaking point that is directly related to decades of underfunding,” said Leslie Blatteau, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers. Blatteau spoke at a news conference held at James Hillhouse High School in New Haven Thursday morning.
In recent months, Lamont has said that his administration has made Connecticut’s “largest ever commitment” to K-12 education, including in his February State of the State Address. The administration said the FY-25 budget included “historic levels” of funding and that the state’s Education Cost Sharing grant to cities and towns has “grown by $345 million, while overall K-12 enrollment in the state has decreased.”
But education stakeholders have pushed back, arguing that, although the actual amount of state funding may be at a historic high, the state’s share of education funding has actually decreased when you take into consideration inflation, increasing municipal investment and how much funding other states send to local school systems.
“We can all put out the fliers, the mailers and say we’ve done historic things, but when we continue to hear the stories directly from the people most impacted, we know that [the historic investment] is simply false,” said Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, who served as the house co-chair of the Education Committee, but did not seek reelection this year. “We as a state are not upholding our end of this agreement.”
Joe DeLong, the CEO of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and a member of the 119k Commission, which has been leading the charge on an initiative to re-engage thousands of disconnected youth across the state, said the state did invest an additional $150 million into education last year, but it happened “against incredible headwinds.”
“Part of that narrative has been, ‘Oh we’ve made the greatest investments in the last few years,’ and by doing that, that is a complete fiction. Since 2017, Connecticut has reduced its proportional share of public education funding to the tune of about $407 million annually. That is $407 million that has been shifted out of the state budget, and shifted over into local budgets,” DeLong said, adding that Connecticut hasn’t been a “leader in the country when it comes to the state supporting public education.
“Connecticut, at the state level, supports 36% of education funding,” DeLong continued. “Most of our surrounding states are anywhere from 41 to 45%. We are in the lowest quartile in the country in how much the state of Connecticut funds public education. So, if you’ve heard that we’re a leader, that is fiction.”
Last month, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities released a report that called for the expansion of youth support services at the local and state levels — at an estimated cost of $900 million.
In their proposed decade-long strategy, CCM called for increasing investment, accountability and transparency in broad swaths of government, including K-12 education, job training and mental health to help disconnected and at-risk youth.
The report outlined four “strategic pillars:” coordinating supports for youth at all levels of the system; creating stronger conditions for youth success within and beyond school; increasing capacity in the system; and building and sustaining coalitions. It also proposed that Connecticut could pay for annual costs associated with its strategy through three major sources: reinvesting fiscal impact of strategy ($650 million to $750 million), reallocation of spending ($500 million to $900 million) and new or expanded revenue sources ($300 million to $2 billion) through spending cap carve-outs, investment, philanthropy, federal funding and new taxes.
The initial cost to begin the expansions would be closer to $150 million.
Julia Bergman, Lamont’s director of communications, said in a statement to The Connecticut Mirror Thursday that the governor “appreciates the work of the 119k Commission and its efforts to engage many voices,” and that his priority “is investing in what’s working for our youth including historic funding for early childhood and K-12 education, but also investing in their families, which we know is key to ensuring that our young people stay engaged and connected.”
Bergman did not comment directly on DeLong’s criticisms of existing funding efforts. But the Lamont administration indicated in a report released Wednesday that it will not have the capacity to invest more money in education, social services, child care and other core programs because fixed costs, such as Medicaid and debt payments, are all rising.
Bergman added that “the governor always welcomes conversations about what we can do better to ensure our investments are making an impact.”
At the Thursday press conference, Blatteau, Currey and DeLong were joined by New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, Stratford Mayor Laura Hoydick, CT Association of School Superintendents Executive Director Fran Rabinowitz and others.
The group called for at least a $407 million investment into the ECS model for the state to proportionally catch up to what its investment once was. They also tasked the state legislature to consider revisions to the state K-12 funding formula to ensure more equitable funding based on student needs and proposed an increase to special education funding.
“The state has done some really good things, but we need more,” Rabinowitz said. “As a former superintendent in Bridgeport, I can tell you, we need more. We need more resources. We need those pathways for our kids in high school. … We need state of the art interventions in special education.”
“Every day, hundreds of thousands of Connecticut students go to schools that lack the services, staffing and funding needed to help them reach their full potential, succeed in the classroom, and be prepared for college and the workforce. This is the direct result of an inequitable and inadequate funding system, and it is leaving students behind and communities in crisis,” said Lisa Hammersley, the executive director of the School and State Finance Project.