Keep promise made to Boards of Education

Reworking local school budgets mid-stream only makes our challenges more difficult, and we are urging legislators and Gov. Lamont to stick with their plan.

The first weeks of April usher flower blooms, spring fever and baseball season to the Nutmeg State, and they also signify peak budget season for Connecticut’s local and regional boards of education and the General Assembly.

This means the 1,400 members of Connecticut’s local and regional public boards of education — the largest group of elected officials in the state — are hard at work setting their priorities and building their spending plans for the fiscal year ahead, which begins July 1. And as is typical, many of these board members have one eye on their balance sheets and one on the State Capitol — the No. 1 source of state education policies and funding.

Connecticut’s boards of education are tasked with delivering on the promise of Connecticut’s constitutional mandate to provide a free and appropriate education for all of Connecticut’s children, and we fulfill that promise with several partners — including school superintendents, public school teachers, administrators and staff, Gov. Ned Lamont and the members of the Connecticut General Assembly who write the laws and the budgets that help drive and fund public education.

Last year, lawmakers from both political parties and Gov. Lamont demonstrated their commitment to funding public education by passing a $150 million package to accelerate the phase-in of the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Formula — the state’s primary funding grant for local education — and create a uniform and streamlined way to fund schools of choice such as magnet schools, agricultural science and technology centers, Open Choice, and charter schools.

Reworking local school budgets mid-stream only makes our challenges more difficult, and we are urging legislators and Gov. Lamont to stick with their plan. This is why Connecticut’s public schools are counting on this two-year promise in our current and upcoming budgets, and the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE), on their behalf, is working every day to make sure the funding stays intact.

Unfortunately, we have reason to worry.

In February, Gov. Lamont proposed diverting $48 million of the promised funding for schools of choice to pay for early childhood costs. We are heartened at the strong bipartisan support we are seeing from legislators to reject this proposed cut so we can keep the money that we are counting on at the local level.

Last month, CABE brought board members from the four corners of the state to meet face-to-face with state lawmakers at the Capitol with one unified message: Keep your promises and maintain your commitment to our public schools.

Education policy is written primarily in the legislature’s Education Committee, and paid for by the Appropriations Committee and final action by the House and Senate. Now that the Education Committee’s work is done, we are closely working with members of the Appropriations Committee to make sure they protect education funds for next year that have already been committed to in their two-year budget.

Gov. Lamont and state legislators have until midnight on Wednesday, May 8, to finish their business and make adjustments to the two-year budget they adopted last year, and we are watching them very closely.

As we work with them to keep their promise of education funding, we ask that they evaluate all education legislation with two critical questions: “How will this legislation promote student achievement?” and “What is the fiscal and administrative impact on local communities?”

With this lens, we can help ensure the strength of the partnership we have delivering the promise of public education to our state.