nothin Alders Examine School Funding | New Haven Independent

Alders Examine School Funding

Christopher Peak Photo

Daniel Long testifies before alders.

Why is $3,100 more spent on a child’s education in Greenwich than a child’s education in New Haven?

In City Hall’s aldermanic chambers on Wednesday night, the Board of Alders Education Committee presented that question and many others to several experts as part of a workshop on funding New Haven’s public schools.

With 13.5 percent cuts to the federal education budget on the way, Connecticut’s tax receipts in freefall and a lawsuit challenging the state’s funding allocations before the state Supreme Court, the seven alders present used the moment to take stock. Over two hours, they discussed their school district’s financial outlook, imagined what a fairer distribution of money statewide might look like and strategized on how to accomplish change in the current political environment.

Alders Kenneth Reveiz; Aaron Greenberg, the committee chair; and Darryl Brackeen, Jr., the vice-chair.

Oftentimes, on this board and on this committee, we’re very concerned with how our Board of Education spends money, not where their money comes from,” said Alder Aaron Greenberg, the committee chair. Given the budget situation in Hartford, it felt like the right time to have this conversation” about Connecticut’s school funding formulas.

Currently, New Haven’s public school system expends about $18,200 annually to educate each student — slightly above the state average. The amount edges out Danbury ($12,800) and New Britain ($13,200), but lags behind Westport ($19,800) and Greenwich ($21,300).

The system developed, in large part, because of the differences in towns’ tax revenues. Greenwich’s expensive estates largely fund their public schools, paying for 95.3 percent of the district’s budget with local taxes. New Haven relies heavily on the state: The Elm City covers only 24.6 percent of its district’s budget with local taxes and 1.6 percent with tuition and charitable donations, while 61.0 percent comes from the state and 12.8 percent from the feds.

There’s really three ways you can get a good education in Connecticut: You buy it, you win it or you steal it,” said Sean Matteson, the chief operating officer of ConnCAN, an education advocacy group. You buy it by moving into a good school district, you can win it by getting a place in the lottery to get into a good school, or you can steal it by lying about where you live.”

A Long History

State legislators have grappled with how to appropriate money to each school district since a landmark court decision — Horton v. Meskill — in 1977. Before the case, each district was largely financed through its local property tax revenues without any state support to equalize the differences between wealthy suburbs and cash-strapped cities. In Horton v. Meskill, Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled that setup an unconstitutional infringement on students’ rights to a public education.

A decade later, in 1988, the General Assembly devised the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula. Though revised repeatedly, most recently in 2013, the system still governs how much each municipality receives to keep schools operational. At its core, the ECS is designed to make up the difference between the cost of teaching each child (including extra for high-need pupils) and local governments’ abilities to raise tax revenue to pay for it.

Daniel Long.

However, even based on current estimates (set at a baseline of $11,525 per student), the state doesn’t have enough money to fully fund its obligations, coming about $600 million short. (According to the Connecticut School Finance Project, New Haven should receive an additional $17.5 million in ECS funding.) Instead, legislators have been allocating available funds in what are essentially block grants that approximate each community’s share, said Daniel Long, research director at Connecticut Voices for Children.

Due to a lack of motivation and budget shortfalls, the efforts to reach this full funding formula never materialized,” Long said. Each year, there’s been negotiations at the Legislature to create a list of what the ECS distribution should be that’s moved further and further away from the original intention.”

And ECS is just one formula. Connecticut has 11 different funding formulas in place to divvy up the education budget, doling out other pools of money to magnet and charter schools, as well as technical high schools and agriscience centers.

Should The Money Follow The Kid?

Those separate streams can sometimes result in vastly different spending per pupil within a district, compounding the disparities in aid that already exist between towns. During the workshop, alders repeatedly referenced this reality. Anna Festa, who represents East Rock, asked the experts whether it wouldn’t be preferable for sums to be allocated per student and for that money to follow the child even after a transfer.

Rev. Abraham Hernandez.

Abraham Hernandez, associate pastor at Grace Fellowship Church, noted similar problems with how the state views native Spanish speakers. While the state funding formula intentionally offers more for high-needs students — an extra 30 percent bonus in state grants — students with disabilities and English-language learners aren’t included in their calculation. That exclusion left Hernandez dumbfounded,” given the influx of Spanish speakers in New Haven’s schools. The governor’s latest plan to revise the school funding formula could shear off even more money that New Haven relies on. In March, Gov. Dannel Malloy proposed counting impoverished students using Medicaid enrollment figures, rather than the number in federal free-lunch programs. That would erase undocumented immigrants, who cannot apply for Medicaid, from the total.

Hernandez also pointed out that New Haven’s public school district isn’t always fair in how it hands out the money. He said he’d talked to one principal who couldn’t afford to replace keyboards with missing letters, while other administrators finished the year with a surplus. How can I go to Hartford to advocate for equity in school funding when within our city we’re seeing the same thing?” the pastor asked. I’m here to say, regardless of where somebody goes — charter, magnet, public — the money should follow the child, so we make sure that the goal posts are not moved for different children.”

Chris Willems, a science teacher at Metropolitan Business Academy, disagreed. He said his 20 years in the classroom taught him that schools succeed when the entire system works, when it has supports ready for all the student body’s needs. He said he worried that breaking down schools into collections of individual humans with individual price tags and pots of money attached to them” could prove destabilizing,” as services might be cut or funds gobbled up by special interests.

Why do we have 11 funding streams? Because we have a very bizarre state,” Willems added. We need a complicated system to make up for the complicated levels of racism and segregation that we have in this state.”

Alders Anna Festa and Evelyn Rodriguez query the experts.

Arriving at a more equitable funding arrangement won’t be easy, attendees at the workshop agreed.

The first step, Long argued, needed to be an honest accounting of the current system’s shortcomings. I don’t think we should be shy [about the level of money needed to provide an adequate education]. I think we should be honest and realize we don’t have the funds right now,” he said. We should say this is an aspiration: We want to figure out ways to get here.”

One idea from Connecticut Voices for Children is to institute a statewide property tax, akin to Vermont, that rewards municipalities that pay a high tax burden for their schools. Municipalities with higher mill rates would also receive higher per-pupil spending; a community could choose to spend less on schools to have lower tax rates. Under this proposal, three-quarters of the state would see a property tax cut averaging $406; the other quarter would pay an extra $1,579 on average.

Referencing Youth Stat and New Haven Promise, Long also praised Elm City schools for efficiently mobilizing their limited funds.

That point resonated with several alders. I toot the horn of the teachers in New Haven. It’s amazing what they do with the little that they have,” said Evelyn Rodriguez, alder for the Hill. I see the product coming out. We’re getting some of our children into Ivy League schools. So I just want to say that they’re working really hard, and they deserve better.”

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