On May 7, 2024, the General Assembly passed H.B. 5523, a budget stabilization bill that appropriates funds for fiscal year 2025 and makes a number of different policy changes to K-12 education and other areas. Along with maintaining the $150 million in additional funding for K-12 education in FY 2025 that was allotted as part of the state budget passed last year, the bill overhauls how Connecticut distributes state education funding to school districts.
This policy briefing details the current mismatch between student learning needs and per-student spending in Connecticut’s local and regional public school districts, and examines some of the factors that contribute to this mismatch.
One learning need currently not weighted for in the ECS formula is special education. This summary document provides an overview how adding a weight for students with disabilities to the ECS formula would benefit students, the cost of adding such a weight, and other states that currently weight for special education in their funding formulas.
Excess Cost grant reimbursement requests for FY 2024 significantly exceeded the $181 million appropriated for the grant in the state budget, and are expected to exceed the amount appropriated in FY 2025. Without additional funding, districts and towns will not receive the reimbursement levels specified in statute for the Excess Cost grant, resulting in less funding for all districts educating high-needs students with disabilities.
This model provides the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula phase-in schedule, and estimated grants from FY 2020 to FY 2032, for each Connecticut municipality based on current inputs and variables.
The purpose of this tool is to provide comparisons between Connecticut towns based on the data used in the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula. The ECS formula is the method the State of Connecticut has established to distribute approximately $2.36 billion annually in state education funding to local and regional public school districts.