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.
Boxed in by a budget that embraces the fiscal guardrails put in place before he was elected, Gov. Ned Lamont will tinker around the edges when it comes to adjusting the two-year budget.
Hundreds of staff members at Connecticut schools could face layoffs as federal pandemic-relief funds expire, and state lawmakers appear unlikely to come to the rescue. A year after signing off on $150 million in additional funding for K-12 education, Gov. Ned Lamont will seek to redirect some of those funds to early child care, his budget chief said Wednesday.
Connecticut school districts have spent $981 million of a total $1.7 billion in federal pandemic relief funds meant to offset the costs of educational expenses like paying teachers and improving facilities, according to a Thursday update by the School + State Finance Project.
State funding for the city’s public school system has increased for the current fiscal year and for the following year. However, those monies still fall short of what advocates say is considered full funding under the state-determined formula.
State legislators and Gov. Ned Lamont have agreed to boost funding for UConn, the state university system and K-12 schools by hundreds of millions of dollars over initial budget proposals.