When the sun came up Wednesday, the day after Election Day, the nation was still unsettled over who would be moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January, but in Newtown it was perfectly clear that voters were happy with their elected representatives. From US senator to state representative, local voters chose to return their incumbent legislators to Hartford and Washington, DC.

Newtown’s “home team” in Hartford – State Senator John McKinney, and state representatives Julia Wasserman, Pat Shea, and John Stripp – has its work cut out for it. None of them are particularly partisan, and all are willing to work with their Democratic counterparts, so their status as members of the Republican minority in the legislature is probably less of a challenge than their status as non-urban legislators. In Hartford, party politics is often not as potent as the politics of place, and over the years state resources have been shifted away from suburban and rural towns and funneled into the cities. The simplistic reasoning in Hartford holds that smaller towns are richer towns and can therefore fend for themselves a little better.

In truth, Newtown does not have the capacity to sustain the repeated cuts in state Educational Cost Sharing grants that have been made in recent years. Not too many “riches” can be found in the town’s general fund anymore. At precisely the time when the local school population is burgeoning, the state is trimming its support for those schools. Last year the cut was nearly half a million dollars. What will it be this year?

Newtown’s legislators need to form whatever alliances they can with the representatives of other suburban towns to address the state’s retrenchment in its support of public education. If the current trend persists, the state will continue to build its own surpluses on the back of local property taxes. Last week, State Comptroller Nancy Wyman projected that Connecticut will end the fiscal year 2001 with a budget surplus of $379.8 million. We aren’t suggesting a new state spending spree just because the people of Connecticut were overtaxed this year. We just want the state to continue to live up to its traditional commitment to public education.