Christopher Peak Photo
Career High students walk out in protest over city budget cuts — while suburbs keep money meant to educate them. Below: State funding formula for inter-district magnets outside Hartford.
Connecticut School Finance Project
Suburban school districts are being paid millions of dollars for students they don’t teach, while sticking New Haven taxpayers with the bill for educating their kids.
Thanks to a funding formula that experts say is broken, the state has been paying out money to the municipalities where students live, rather than where they go to school.
Last school year, because of this little-understood technicality, the state government sent nearby towns $13.8 million for students who go to New Haven’s city-operated inter-district magnet schools.
The suburbs got to pocket that money, even though the kids were no longer being educated in their schools. In the process, they cushioned their budgets — sometimes with millions of dollars in free cash — as New Haven raised property taxes, shuttered schools and laid off teachers.
Staring down a $20-$30 million budget deficit this year, local officials are vowing to get that cash back from the suburbs.
The city’s 16 inter-district magnets are highly coveted schools that were rebuilt in a failed attempt to voluntarily desegregate across town lines. In an examination of records and in interviews, the Independent found that suburban school districts are being subsidized to let their kids go.
In total, nearby towns are keeping $13,823,000 for the 2,645 students who they send off to New Haven’s inter-district magnet schools.
The Independent reached that estimate by multiplying the state’s per-pupil subsidy with the number of students each town sends to New Haven. (Click on the towns on the above map to see how much each keeps in ECS money.)
The amount that other towns get to keep varies widely, largely based on how many students they send and how wealthy the state thinks they are. Some towns, like Madison, are retaining just a couple hundred bucks, while other towns, like West Haven, are raking in millions.
The towns that profit the most from this arrangement are West Haven, which keeps $6,032,000; Hamden, $2,573,000; East Haven, $2,030,000; Ansonia, $886,000; Derby, $384,000; and Naugatuck, $308,000.
Those towns do retain some responsibilities for the kids they send to New Haven, the most expensive being the excess costs of special education services beyond what New Haven receives on a per pupil basis from public and private sources.
Recognizing the inequity, state law does allow for New Haven to collect the cost of educating suburban kids by charging other towns tuition for its inter-district magnet schools. That idea has been floated since 2016, but New Haven’s administrators haven’t pursued it.
Katie Roy, the executive director of the Connecticut School Finance Project, said that New Haven is leaving millions of dollars on the table — money that, she added, the city shouldn’t have to hunt down in the first place.
“The state shouldn’t be sending money to the sending district that doesn’t educate these students, then leave it up to the receiving district to go after that money and decide how much to charge. That creates this inter-town relational problem,” she said. “In my opinion, if a kid lives in Hamden but goes to school in New Haven, we should not be giving the money to Hamden, then telling New Haven, ‘You have to go get that money.’”
A Broken Formula
Connecticut School Finance Project
In a legislature dominated by suburban interests, it’s unsurprising that suburbs come out on top — except when the state’s main school funding formula was explicitly designed to redistribute the largess from country estates to poorer cities, where the tax base is severely curtailed by the presence of universities, hospitals, social-service agencies and government offices.
Ever since 1977, when the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in Horton v. Meskill that it’s unfair to fund schools solely based on municipal property taxes, state lawmakers have tried to equalize funding across towns.
A decade later, in 1988, the General Assembly first introduced the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula, as an attempt to make sure each town had the minimum amount it needed to keep its schools functioning.
At its core, the ECS is designed to make up the difference between the price of teaching each child (including a bit extra for high-needs students) and a local government’s ability to raise the tax revenue to pay for it.
Advocates have long pointed out that the formula isn’t based on any research about the true cost of an education. They argue that it drastically underestimates what it takes to teach a student dealing with learning disabilities, language barriers, concentrated poverty or even just city life.
Even then, the legislature has routinely shortchanged the formula, distributing aid instead through block grants that have been about $800 million short.
During the last legislative session, lawmakers committed to meeting their obligations within the next decade, which would lead to a $20.9 million increase for New Haven by 2028 at current enrollment levels, according to the Connecticut School Finance Project.
As they’ve attempted to tackle some of those bigger issues besetting the formula, state legislators said they’ve been aware that they eventually need to deal with the fact that ECS money is being diverted from city-run magnet schools, but they haven’t gotten around to fixing it.
In total, between ECS and supplementary grants for the magnet program, New Haven receives roughly $12,550 for each city resident and $8,385 for each suburban resident in its inter-district magnet schools.
While the problem lingers, New Haven’s schools are being forced to make cuts.
“You’re seeing part of this play out in New Haven right now. You end up with a situation like this: New Haven is educating a large number of kids from the surrounding suburban districts and frankly not receiving as much money as they should to educate those kids,” Roy said. “Now, you have a deficit situation in New Haven that is going to result in cuts to the schools, which obviously impacts teachers and kids and everyone else; is going to result in New Haven taxpayers having to pick up part of the bill; or a situation where you have a little of both. It’s already a town with a high mill rate and cuts at the school level.
“It really creates a system that I think is fundamentally unfair and ultimately disadvantages students,” she added. “It results in a situation in which a school district does not have the money that it needs for the kids enrolled in their schools.”
New Haven’s school system also benefited from the creation of the magnet program for years. State support counted for the lion’s share of $1.7 billion in school construction, and the city still gets money from another inter-district magnet funding stream, which pays $7,085 per suburban student and $3,000 per city student.
The legislature initially paid ECS money to sending districts to get buy-in on those programs. But the real question now is how long that arrangement makes sense, when the last school is being completed and the ECS formula’s per pupil payment is outpacing the magnet grant.
Time For Tuition?
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Former Board of Ed CFO Victor De La Paz ponders tuition fees in March 2016.
In 2016, New Haven’s former chief financial officer, Victor De La Paz, proposed charging a $750 fee per suburban student who attended its inter-district magnet schools. In the following three years, that tuition would gradually increase to $2,250 per suburban student.
Almost as soon as that was proposed, state legislators passed a law requiring districts like Bridgeport and New Haven to seek state permission months in advance.
Darnell Goldson, the president of New Haven’s school board and a Hartford lobbyist for a concert ticket reseller, said that he’d never seen the Connecticut legislature, with the support of New Haven’s delegation, act so quickly.
“When we talked about charging additional tuition for the suburban kids, not only did those legislators strike bak, but so quickly and so efficiently that we could not do that without a year’s notice,” he said. “The legislature worked faster than I’ve ever seen them work to pass a state law.”
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Darnell Goldson: We’re going to get that money.
After the Independent shared its findings with him, Goldson said he was shocked, explaining that he hadn’t realized that suburban districts were being compensated for the kids New Haven has been educating.
Goldson said it was a failure of leadership for New Haven to not have taken steps to start discussing tuition fees — especially this year, as the district faces down a $30 million deficit, about one-third of which is expected to be covered by state grants.
“I’m extremely frustrated that our staff — our well-paid staff — had not identified this as a budget-mitigation activity and acted on it,” he said.
Goldson, who’s running for reelection on a platform of pushing the state to better fund urban education, personally committed to making it his priority at the next board meeting and in future legislative sessions.
“We’re going to get that money, one way or the other, to make sure that our kids have what they deserve. That would eliminate the budget deficit right there, maybe a couple times over,” he said. “We are going to, in the future, work with our state legislators, so that the money is following the kids. If the kid is in our district, the money should be there.”
Suburbs Weigh In
Christopher Peak Photo
West Haven keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have gone to Career High.
Every morning over the last year, close to 100 West Haven students drove across the bridges over West River, headed down Legion or Davenport Avenues and pulled up in the parking lot behind their school, Hill Regional Career High.
Near the end of the year, those same students found out that Superintendent Birks was trying to involuntarily transfer out four of their teachers, who taught social-studies, music and world languages. They staged a walkout, heading to the front of the school to yell into bullhorns, “Don’t mess with our education. Don’t mess with our rights. Don’t take away our teachers.”
Meanwhile, West Haven helped itself to $642,600 in ECS money for the students it sent to Hill Regional Career High — enough money to fund about 10 teacher salaries.
West Haven’s top education official defended that setup, saying that he’d always seen the ECS payments to the suburbs as part of a bargain that had been struck decades ago that allowed the inter-district magnet schools to get started.
West Haven Public Schools
Superintendent Neil Cavallaro: We can’t afford tuition.
Neil Cavallaro, West Haven’s superintendent, said that simply deducting the cost of each student who goes to a magnet school from his budget would leave his district underfunded.
That echoes the same arguments made by charter school opponents, who point out that the cost of, say, a utility bill or a principal’s salary doesn’t go down proportionally each time one student leaves.
“The ECS formula that was in place remained, because just removing students from a classroom doesn’t necessarily reduce the cost of operating a school district,” Cavallaro said. “Now, however, that the New Haven Board of Education continues to run deficits, they are becoming desperate and are looking for ways to charge their partners and break promises and commitments that went along with accepting the funds necessary to build those schools.”
Cavallaro said he was stuck in a bind. He said that his town — whose finances are so shaky that they’ve had to take a state bailout — can’t afford to start paying tuition. But he also said that his schools — including the high school that’s undergoing a $130 million renovation — aren’t big enough to fit every student they’d need to take back.
Cavallaro said that he thinks state lawmakers, including the governor, the education commissioner and the legislators, need to decide what to do, especially about the ECS formula.
“For years, it’s been known that the ECS formula needs to be recalculated, and be made more fair and equitable. It’s a difficult subject, one that no one wants to address [and] one that can’t be settled just by charging cooperating cities,” Cavallaro said. “It seems to me that New Haven shouldn’t be allowed to settle this issue on their own.”
Lemar: Change Coalition Growing
Markeshia Ricks Photo
“The next step is to reform ECS and get the balance right. Trying to find equity in the ECS formula has allowed us to have the conversation about what equity looks like more broadly,” said State Rep. Roland Lemar (pictured at left in above photo). “Being that school districts align so closely with towns, there’s very little incentive to break out of the status quo. We’re trying to build a political consensus that’s hard to reach. A lot of these towns would lose out on funding so that one town can gain.”
Wouldn’t suburban towns still benefit from giving New Haven a bigger share of ECS money? After all, wouldn’t their students who choose to go to inter-district magnet schools be better off with adequately funded schools?
If only the politics were that easy, said Lemar, a public-school parent who sits on the legislature’s Education Committee.
“We’re supposed to come back with more money for them; that’s what a legislator is inclined to do. If Hamden is told, ‘You’re losing out on dollars and now we want to charge that town tuition too,’ that’s a huge cost for the sending town. They’re not told that hundreds of students are getting a better education under this model; they’re told that thousands of students are being shortchanged,” he said.
“That’s where the political realities come in,” Lemar continued. “Those of us in New Haven might see this as inequitable, that we’re not getting our fair share, but the vast majority send their kids to public schools in their towns, in which the status quo is perfectly acceptable to them. They want it to remain exactly how it is, to protect the privilege and status that they’ve accrued.”
Lemar added, though, that a group of legislators “who see the big picture” about reforming ECS are coming together. “The coalition is growing,” he said.
The Independent plans to continue to look at the various ways that New Haven’s 16 inter-district magnet schools have changed public education throughout the region. Do you have a story you’d like to tell us? Is there something about the schools that you want to know? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]. The Independent will not share nor publish anything you tell us without first obtaining your explicit agreement.
More proof that NH is mismanaged by people clearly over their head when it comes to leading this city to prosperity.
Clueless and bamboozled "leaders" running this city into the ground.
Does anyone here know what they're doing ?