Alexandra Martinakova photo
Mayor Elicker on Tuesday: "Given all the pressures on public schools, I feel strongly that this is the right place for the money to go."
Mayor Justin Elicker is looking to send another $3 million in city funds to the Board of Education to help close the school district’s budget deficit for the fiscal year that started Tuesday.
According to Elicker, this proposed budget bump won’t be enough to keep Brennan-Rogers School open.
Elicker made that announcement while answering reporters’ questions at an unrelated press conference Tuesday at Wilbur Cross High School.
The mayor said he plans to ask the Board of Alders to increase the city’s annual contribution to the school district by an additional $3 million, on top of the $5 million the Board of Alders already approved for Fiscal Year 2025 – 26 (FY26).
Elicker told the Independent that the source of the funding would be state grants, which came in $3 million higher than expected. City spokesperson Lenny Speiller said $2.5 million is from the Supplemental Revenue Sharing Grant, and the rest is from the state Office of Policy and Management (OPM).
“We have dramatically increased, over these past five years, our funding on the municipal side to education,” Elicker said at Tuesday’s press conference, “and we have not seen that kind of funding increase coming from the state.” He said that the city has increased its educational funding by 50% since Fiscal Year 2020 – 2021.
Elicker’s announcement comes several hours before he and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Supt. Madeline Negrón are expected to lead a presentation for the press at John C. Daniels School at 4:15 p.m. about the superintendent’s new budget-mitigation proposal for the new fiscal year.
In that proposal, which the Board of Education is slated to hear and vote on at a separate meeting at John C. Daniels School at 5 p.m., the district would close Brennan-Rogers School, eliminate vacant teacher and central office positions, reduce funding for athletics-related travel, and make a number of other cuts in order to avoid a previously pitched plan to lay off up to 129 student-facing school staffers.
Elicker told the Independent on Tuesday that this proposed $3 million bump — which still needs to be reviewed and voted on by the alders — would not be sufficient to keep Brennan-Rogers School open. It also won’t be enough to fill some of the district’s long-standing vacancies. It’s designed, however, to help the district avoid potential layoffs.
“[The $3 million] does not change the situation around Brennan-Rogers or the elimination of a lot of teacher vacancies, because in Dr. Negrón work to mitigate the budget gap, there’s still a remaining deficit,” he told the Independent Tuesday. “This is an effort to have Dr. Negrón not have to make more cuts as we jointly work to prevent layoffs.”
He added, “Given all the pressures on public schools, I feel strongly that this is the right place for the money to go.”
The $3 million allocation will now go before the Board of Alders for review and approval.
East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, who had advocated for more city funds to be allocated toward the school system in May by way of a budget amendment that did not ultimately pass, expressed support for the allocation in an interview Tuesday. As the city advocates for reforms to the way the state allocates funding to school districts, she said, “it felt important to me that we were also following through” with municipal funding increases, particularly given the pace of inflation.
“I believe that investing in our schools is one of the most moral and data driven investment that we can make in our community. And so in this moment of real challenge around our budget for schools, to be able to provide $3 million so that our student-facing staff are able to stay in their roles makes a lot of sense to me,” Smith said.
Opponents of Smith’s amendment in May had argued that alders should have more transparency from the Board of Education about public school spending before allocating more funds to the school system.
Finance Committee Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand, who had voted along with a majority of his colleagues against Smith’s amendment in the spring, noted that the Board of Education has since released a more detailed breakdown of school-by-school spending. “It remains to be seen how people respond to that, how they think about that,” Marchand said.
“More dollars are always welcome. In addition to more dollars, we need more transparency and understanding of the budget as a whole so that we can have more informed public discourse about how the dollars are being spent,” said Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller.
For more reporting on the schools budget, click here. For a newly released line-by-line breakdown of school expenditures, click here.
Alexandra Martinakova contributed to this report.