Town, school leaders urge passage of CT bill that would ‘mitigate the bloodletting’ of coming fiscal cliff

Mayors, clergy and school district leaders mobilized in Hartford Thursday to urge Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly to fast-track state education funding in an attempt to scale down public schools’ impending fall from a fiscal cliff carved by the expiration of federal COVID relief.

Education stakeholders joined the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities Thursday to unveil a $100,000 ad campaign promoting the passage of H.B. 5003 — a widely popular proposal to accelerate the state’s Education Cost Sharing grant schedule and fully fund Connecticut’s public, charter, vocational and magnet schools by 2025.

The bill, which saw more than 60 state representatives sign on as co-sponsors, 400 submissions of supporting testimony, and a unanimous vote of approval from all 44 members of the General Assembly’s Education Committee, comes at a $375.5 million price tag that was omitted from both the governor’s and the Appropriations Committee’s biennial budget proposals.

Education funding has emerged as a point of contention between the two budgets. While Lamont favored the current 10-year ECS schedule with districts reaching full funding in 2028, the appropriations committee proposed to halt scheduled decreases, but continue increases. H.B. 5003 supporters want a full acceleration in Fiscal Year 2025 with maintained funding for districts that would have seen a decline in funding per the schedule.

On Thursday House Speaker Matthew Ritter said that ECS funding may emerge as a priority for the caucus.

“I’m sure we all want to do it,” House Speaker Ritter said Thursday. “I heard in the appropriations committee that the number one priority for Republicans and Democrats was more money for nonprofits. For example, ECS might be another one, we’ve heard higher education. … It will come perhaps at the expense of something else and I think once members see what the other side of that ledger looks like, I think it changes people’s minds about what actually can be done.”

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora said that Republicans are working on education funding on a bipartisan basis.

“Generally we believe education funding should come through a formula so that it’s about educating children and getting money to the kids and so that’s where our focus is. And I appreciate CCM’s input,” Candelora said. “I think a lot of our party is concerned about the governor’s proposal to accelerate ECS, leaving a lot of our districts behind, losing money. We want to make sure that no one is left behind.”

Lamont said he is open to negotiations on the issue.

“The legislature put in place the acceleration of ECS in 2017. Usually people are talking about pausing it, or delaying it, or cutting it, and now the legislature’s talking about speeding it up,” Lamont said at a budget press conference last week. “With over $700 million in federal money still to be invested, maybe we don’t have to speed it up quite as fast, but we’ll negotiate over that.”

Once that final batch of federal funds expires on Sept. 30, 2024, School and State Finance Project Executive Director Lisa Hammersley said the impact on districts and municipalities will be calamitous.

“In fiscal year 2025, national education policy funding experts are referring to that fiscal cliff as ‘the bloodletting,’” Hammersley said. “It is going to be significant and it will be severe. And the kids that’ll harm the most are those students that are in underfunded, high-need districts.”

Hammersley said H.B. 5003 would “mitigate the bloodletting that will be occurring,” and maintain the positions and programs created to support students through the pandemic and its fallout, without overtaxing residents.

“Back in 2017 when the General Assembly negotiated the formula, they were facing billion dollar deficit after billion dollar deficit and simply did not have the resources to fund this formula in full,” Hammersly said. “67% of students right now are not fully funded according to their need, according to that formula…Having the state fully fund what it’s already committed to, just sooner, is a significant step in the right direction.”

Advocates said that H.B. 5003 targets more than the fiscal cliff, but the inequities that plague the state’s education system.

During the bill’s public hearing members of the Jewish Community Relations Council and Greater Hartford Interfaith Action Alliance pointed to the “longstanding injustice” of the “race-based funding disparity” that has led Connecticut to spend $713 million more on majority white districts than diverse districts.

“School districts with the highest concentration of high needs students, various students in poverty, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities almost universally spend less per student than school districts with a more affluent student population,” Madeline Negrón, the acting deputy superintendent of academics and school leadership for Hartford Public Schools, said at the press conference Thursday. “This is not a criticism, not a criticism of what more affluent towns spending on their children…But rather, this is a call to action, a call for us collectively to do more, do more for high needs students from high needs school communities.”

Negrón, who will soon assume the role of superintendent for New Haven Public School said that H.B. 5003 would boost per-student funding $178 in New Haven and $360 in Hartford.

“An extra $100, $300, $500, a $1,000 per student makes the real difference because you multiply those increases for every classroom and every school,” Negron said.

On the other half of the Capitol Complex union members of the Connecticut Education Association geared up for a lobbying campaign to reintroduce teacher salaries, COVID pension credits, heroes pay and tax credits to the budget conversation after the Appropriations Committee failed to hear H.B. 6881 and H.B. 6884, which sought to address the teacher shortage crisis.

“We’ve seen all of those things disappear from the dialogue,” CEA President Kate Dias said. “We are really concerned that there aren’t any identifiable aspects of the budget that say we’re going to focus on teacher recruitment and retention. We’re not seeing, even in 5003, the focus on how does this money go back to the classroom? How does this serve and, and encourage teachers to stay in the classroom?”

Dias said that over the school year, Connecticut’s teacher shortage has only grown.

“The idea that you’re going to solve a teacher shortage absent any financial asks is absolutely unacceptable,” Dias said. “In the end, we have a big problem here with a shortage of teachers and educators across the state.”

Stratford Superintendent Uyi Osunde said that H.B. 5003 will be key to securing the funding needed to create conditions that retain high-quality educators.

“All superintendents go through this every winter and every spring, we oftentimes have conversations through our budget process about what to keep, or more specifically who to keep,” Osunde said. “Our aim is to keep as many people, our personnel who are so instrumental in the development of our students as learners. Academically with learning loss and the impacts of the pandemic we are now required to pour incredible amount of resources into intervention, the foundational blocks of our literacy and our literacy programs, as well as enrichment opportunities…This bill allows us as a state to deliver the promise for all Connecticut students, for all of Connecticut’s children.”

Deputy Executive Director for Communications & Operations of the School and State Finance Project, Michael Morton said the investments in H.B. 5003 will be crucial to growing the state’s economy.

“When we talk about investing in education, it’s not just, it’s not just throwing money at it.It is actually an investment study after study has shown that when you invest in K-12 education, you see higher test scores, you see greater student achievement, you see higher earnings for life, you see reductions in poverty, and you also see a more prepared, more skilled workforce,” Morton said. “It’s not just spending, it’s investing in the future. And the more we prolong that investment, the more our state is going to be hurt.”