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.
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.
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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.
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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.