Restoring The State As A Partner

In Public Education

With a local budget in the works, one would think a first selectman would be staying close to the office as town and school spending plans run through their prereferendum paces. But last week Pat Llodra’s concerns about local spending took her to Hartford to testify before the legislature’s Appropriations Committee about education funding levels and issues associated with the state’s Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant. Financing public schools is, for the most part, what local budget battles are all about, and an important front in that battle has opened up in Hartford as a result of Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s emphasis on school reform and his revised budget proposal.

In the 2009-2010 school year, $9.9 billion was spent on public elementary and secondary schools in Connecticut. Towns and cities paid 52.9 percent of that total; the state paid 37.4 percent through ECS and other grants; and the federal government paid 9.3 percent. Nonlocal sources of educational funding have been ebbing, Mrs Llodra told state budgetmakers last week: ECS support for the local school budget has slipped from 7.4 percent in 2004 to 6.3 percent in 2011. “The gap created by dwindling state support is made up by increasing property taxes — a burden our citizens are unable or unwilling to accept.”

The state budget panel is in the process of reviewing the governor’s revised $20 billion budget, which increases the state’s ECS spending in municipalities by $54.5 million, reversing, at least temporarily, Hartford’s fading support for public education. (The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities reports that state ECS grants to the towns continue to be underfunded by more than $700 million.) Additionally, a change has been proposed to introduce new flexibility in the “minimum budget requirement” (MBR), which in the past has required school districts to spend no less than they had the previous year. The governor wants exceptions to that rule for districts that realize demonstrable savings from intradistrict efficiencies and regional collaboration so that a penny saved does not just become a penny spent elsewhere.

These financing changes, along with other proposed school reforms, are small first steps along a politically perilous path toward restoring the state as a full-partner in public education in Connecticut. As we have seen with the Malloy Administration’s efforts to address teacher performance evaluations and tenure, deals can be done and undone in short order. Mayors and first selectmen from around the state need to keep the pressure on lawmakers. Like Mrs Llodra, they need to remind legislators how high the stakes — and the property taxes — are in Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities.