Expectations Pared, Schools Set Legislative Priorities

Recognizing that time is short and money is tight, school district administrators have narrowed their state agenda to just a couple asks.

By the end of this year’s session, they’re hoping to win more funds for students with the most expensive learning needs and more flexibility in how they spend the state grant dollars they already receive.

Phillip Penn, the district’s chief financial officer, talked through those scaled-back legislative priorities at Tuesday evening’s Finance & Operations Committee meeting at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters.

Penn said he’d gotten a clear message from New Haven’s delegation: ​“Don’t expect more funding anywhere.”

Gov. Ned Lamont’s proposed budget will direct only $2.37 million more to New Haven’s school system through the primary education funding formula, representing a 1.5 percent increase that will be restricted to certain pre-approved uses.

Worse, it’s far short of the $10.8 million administrators have said they need to avoid another year of budget cuts.

School officials had hoped that their citywide campaign for more dollars, which is being pitched at community management team meetings from Dwight to Westville, would have yielded a different result.

Matt Wilcox, the finance committee chair, said the district’s budget roadshow was still ​“useful,” as the district continues to make the case for increased school funding in the years ahead.

“I do think it’s important to have a multi-year legislative agenda. This will fuel next year and the year after that, until we can get some of these structural changes made,” he said. ​“We have a head start.”

Sarah Miller, a leader of the NHPS Advocates, went to the state Capitol to testify last week. She said that aside from her, every other parent and teacher there to testify was advocating for charter schools, which have been making their own case for higher per-pupil funding.

“Next year, if we went with a busload of people, it would be totally different,” she said.

“There’s nothing like having constituents there talking to them,” agreed Darnell Goldson, one of the school board’s elected members. ​“We did a terrific job with making the case to the community, but we’re talking to each other in an echo chamber. We need to start widening that circle.”

School officials plan to argue that the state should still come up with more money for students with higher needs, including students who are learning English or who have disabilities.

Gov. Lamont’s proposed budget currently includes a $1.2 million budget cut to bilingual education, but Penn said lawmakers had assured him that’s simply a ​“statutory limitation” that will be made up in another line-item.

New Haven’s Rep. Juan Candelaria has introduced H.B. 5088, a separate bill that would put another $7 million into bilingual education, more than tripling what’s currently appropriated before Gov. Lamont’s cuts.

Iline Tracey, the district’s interim superintendent, said she also wants the state to step up its special-education funding, starting this year by taking on the cost for charter schools that the host district is required to pay.

Penn said the district will also support S.B. 58, introduced by Sens. Kevin Witkos and Craig Miner, to increase the per-pupil funding to $12,500 for students in regional agricultural science and technology education centers like The Sound School.

Aside from looking for more dollars, school officials also plan to argue that the state should loosen up on what the district has to do to keep other grants, including for its magnet program and its reform efforts.

Tracey said she wants to see legislators reverse the law that essentially took the court’s desegregation order in Sheff v. O’Neill statewide.

A change in 2017 required all inter-district magnet schools, like the 16 in New Haven open to suburban families, to make sure at least one-quarter of their students identify as white, Asian-American, Native or a mix of those races. If schools didn’t meet those targets, they’d be fined, as was the now-shuttered Cortlandt V.R. Creed High School.

Tracey said she wants to see the state allow other forms of integration, based on economics, rather than race alone.

(Tracey added that she’s also hoping that the state revises that inter-district magnet fund to pay the true cost of educating and transporting students, which New Haven has previously proposed covering through tuition charges to suburban districts.)

The school district is also pushing for more flexibility in its use of the state’s Alliance funds, an add-on to main Educational Cost-Sharing formula for the state’s 33 lowest-performing districts that’s otherwise been flat-funded for most of the past decade.

The Alliance spending, which must be OK’ed by the state education commissioner, can only go toward a limited set of focus areas: coordination with early-childhood providers, foundational reading programs, bilingual education, extended school hours, tiered interventions, wraparound services, or staff recruitment and training.

Penn said it seemed like the statute had been written too narrowly.

“Why not put numeracy on the same footing as literacy?” he asked, as he tries to figure out where to find $500,000 for a new elementary math curriculum to replace the one going out of print. ​“It all suggests deficits in the way it was crafted,” he said.

Still, Penn said he’d heard that the district might have more options than the law suggests, even though the Alliance grant can’t supplant general fund spending. He said he’s heard that proposed hires for bilingual and health teachers can be put on the grant. He added he’ll be looking to Meriden and Vernon as models for what else the grant might be able to cover.