Calculating The Price Of Adequacy

In her efforts to get voters to approve the $104,184,615 budget plan that was the subject of this week’s referendum, Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson may have helped sow the seeds for the budget’s defeat on Tuesday. Earlier in the month, Dr Robinson acknowledged that the pared-down budget provided “inadequate funding for our schools.” While she cautioned that a budget rejection would result in additional cuts to educational funding in Newtown, an increasingly concerned cohort of the local electorate supporting the schools seized on the word “inadequate” and vowed never to shortchange local education by acquiescing to less than adequate funding for the schools. The Bee’s online survey of voters over five days leading up to the referendum suggests that roughly half of those voting against the budget did so because they thought spending on education in the budget was inadequate.

Defining what constitutes adequacy in public education is not simply a matter of semantics and politics. Connecticut’s Constitution [Article 8, section 1] stipulates “There shall always be free pubic elementary and secondary schools in the state,” and last March the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the state has a constitutional obligation to provide a suitable and adequate education. With the help of the Yale Law School’s Education Adequacy Clinic, the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF) had sued the state for failing to provide sufficient funds and resources to fulfill that obligation. The Supreme Court remanded the case to a trial court with instructions to define exactly what “adequate funding” of education means. The court was particularly interested in what constitutes adequacy in terms of staffing, materials and supplies, contracted services, facilities, and transportation. So are Connecticut’s property taxpayers.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, Newtown may have a legal template for measuring educational adequacy that will either sustain or belie the words of the worried superintendent. And depending on the willingness of the state legislature to meet its constitutional obligations, perhaps the financial burden of providing an adequate public education will no longer rest primarily on the shoulders of local property taxpayers.

Until that time, however, those beleaguered taxpayers will have to parse, as best they can, the politics and semantics of educational adequacy for themselves. Now, as Newtown’s Legislative Council recasts a budget plan for yet another town vote, it should press the superintendent of schools for a clearer and more detailed explanation of her definition of an adequate education. It may be a frustrating exercise in subjectivity, but given the mood of the voters this year, someone is going to have to put a price on it — and then sell it to the town.