Reports & Publications

This report highlights policies that currently exist to provide greater accountability and transparency in Connecticut K-12 education, and the impact changes passed during the General Assembly's 2023 regular legislative session will have on these existing policies.

The Connecticut General Assembly's 2023 regular legislative session resulted in a number of changes to state funding for K-12 education. This presentation details these changes and explains how they affect students, schools, and communities.

The Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant is distributed to Connecticut school districts in three parts throughout the year: October, January, and April. This one-pager summarizes the ECS grant payment schedule and how districts receive their ECS grant.

The State of Connecticut contains 169 towns with a wide range of wealth and resident needs. Currently, the State of Connecticut provides financial aid to towns through a variety of statutory and non-statutory grant programs. The current structure for non-education town aid does not sufficiently address the underlying municipal fiscal disparities that are caused by the unequal costs of delivering services and the low revenue raising capacity of towns in Connecticut. The purpose of this policy briefing is to introduce and examine how Connecticut can address municipal fiscal disparities by using a needs-capacity formula to distribute non-education town aid.

This document details how Connecticut could use a needs-capacity formula to distribute non-education municipal aid to the state's cities and towns and help address municipal fiscal disparities. Under a needs-capacity formula, municipalities with the greatest level of fiscal disparity would receive a greater level of state funding, while municipalities with the capacity to pay for services through their own revenue raising capacities receive less or no state funding.