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Hamden town officials and state legislators are calling on the state to provide $780,000 in additional pandemic-related school transportation funding to help cover the cost of new buses, bus monitors, and bus cleaning, as Hamden students prepare to return to school in person this month.
Hamden state legislators and top Hamden Public Schools officials are stepping up those calls for additional state aid in the runup to the Sept. 15 first day of school, and in the wake of the state’s reduction of an initial amount of pandemic-related aid to the town’s school district. Hamden schools will be open five days a week in the fall, with students rotating between in-person classes and distance learning.
Two weeks ago, the state announced how it plans to divide a $130.8 million pot of money — the Coronavirus Relief Fund — among the state’s school districts. The funds are supposed to cover costs incurred because of the pandemic, and come in addition to an earlier CARES Act grant that districts have already received.
When the state originally announced how much each district would get, Hamden was supposed to receive $791,338 — 42 percent of what it had asked for.
Then, last week, the state adjusted the allocations. The state lowered Hamden’s allotment to $535,747.
That amount of money will not allow the town to fund its transportation costs, Hamden school district administrators have said, because estimated costs have increased in the last few weeks as the district continues to determine how it will safely transport students in a pandemic.
The district is now requesting $784,521 more.
District Chief Operating Officer Tom Ariola said those additional needs come from three main areas: cleaning, bus monitors, and additional buses.
Based on CDC guidelines, he said, the district should have a bus monitor on every bus to make sure students are following safety precautions, and it hopes to hire an additional 25, which will cost around $480,000. In order to keep the number of students on each bus at 20, the district will need five more buses, he said. That will cost about $280,000. Finally, cleaning costs will be higher than the district originally thought because the cleaning vendor that First Student, the district’s transit operator, wanted to hire was not federally approved.
On Wednesday, the Democrats in Hamden’s state legislative delegation — Rep. Mike D’Agostino, Sen. Martin Looney, Rep. Robyn Porter, and Rep. Josh Elliott — sent a letter to state Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona asking for the additional funding.
“These reductions will inevitably result in layoffs and the curtailing of pedagogical programs,” they wrote in the letter. “As an Alliance district, that is the last thing that should be happening in the Hamden school district.”
Peter Yazbak, a spokesperson for the state education department, said the Coronavirus Relief Fund money will be given to districts as reimbursements for costs that they actually incur. The numbers the state announced two weeks ago and then changed are therefore not set in stone, and will only be certain once districts actually incur costs.
At the end of September or the beginning of October, he said, the state will review how much districts have actually spent and will adjust allocations accordingly. He said the state is also pursuing any additional federal funds it can find that could help districts with pandemic-related costs.
Transportation Costs Adjusted
Tom Ariola.
In July, the state education department surveyed districts to ask how much additional funding they would need to cover the costs of the pandemic in the next school year. In total, they requested $420 million.
Yazbak said that survey asked districts to estimate the costs of a fully in-person school year. The state used those survey results to determine the allocations it would give towns from the $130 million Coronavirus Relief Fund.
The state broke the fund into four different pockets: $60.2 million is available for cleaning, health costs, and personal protective equipment (PPE), $20.6 million for transportation, $41 million for academic costs, and $9 million for student support.
The state then sent another survey in August asking districts what model they plan to follow — in-person, hybrid, or remote. The survey asked for an updated cost estimate, Yazbak said.
When the state adjusted the relief fund allocations last week, it only adjusted the transportation portion of the grants. Yazbak said the new allocations were supposed to reflect what districts had reported their plan for reopening was in the second survey. A district that will open remotely would not need to spend as much money on transportation, he said.
Districts that had opted for remote plans saw their funding decrease. New Haven, which plans to open with a fully remote model, got about a $200,000 reduction.
Hamden, on the other hand, is pursuing a hybrid model that will still require a significant amount of busing. Yazbak said the town originally estimated it would need $78,000 for additional transportation costs when it filled out the survey.
But since then, Ariola said, the district’s cost estimates have increased as it has hammered out the details of what transportation will actually look like.
This is not the first time the town has been disappointed by how much it will get from pandemic-related pockets of money administered by the state.
This grant is a second round of school funding, after the state already doled out an initial $111 million to districts that it announced in May.
In that first round, Hamden got about $987,000. But not all of that was for the district. Ariola said the district later found out that about $200,000 of that had to go to private schools in the town.
Legislators said it can be puzzling to explain how Hamden, one of the state’s most financially distressed towns with a very large low-income population, got less money than many smaller, wealthier districts.
Greenwich, for instance, is slated to receive about $1.2 million from the Coronavirus Relief Fund. Bloomfield, with a population just over a third of Hamden’s, is supposed to get about $1.5 million from the fund.
Looney said he thinks there may have been “some inexactitude in the estimate of the need by some towns, and some lack of adequacy about the department of education’s response.” He said some towns may have put together more detailed estimates than others, or some may have asked for more than they need.
D’Agostino pinned more blame on the system, which relies heavily on local property taxes and administers education on a very local level, than on the state or other towns.
“Everyone likes a localized education system,” he said. “But it’s at times like this you really see the pitfalls of it.”
Yet more proof that the education funding system in the State of CT is flawed and slanted in favor of the richer towns over the poorer ones due to the reliance on property taxes. The communities with the greatest educational and special services needs should get the most funding, and the education funding should have also have an equity throughout the State on a dollars per pupil funding. Smaller towns can regionalize their services with neighboring towns for a bigger bang for their buck. It would help everybody's property taxes and educational resources if the State regionalized for all sorts of public services and spread the wealth around in a more equitable way for the good of all the State's communities. Not to mention that the suburbs and rural communities benefit from and use the services provided by some cities and towns for hospitals, colleges and universities, municipal and judicial services, and social services and support programs, and subsidized housing and arts and entertainment. Its time for everybody to pay their fair share for the good of all of us in the State of CT.