CT Education Committee to Take Up School Funding, Cellphone Bans
Connecticut lawmakers haven’t adjusted the baseline per-pupil state funding for public education in over a decade. This year, they’ll consider raising the base rate — and tying it to inflation.
Education Committee Co-Chair Rep. Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield, said that’s “priority No. 1” for her, potentially resolving a source of growing financial pressure for public schools. Leeper said she wants to phase out local school districts’ financial responsibility for students who attend “choice” schools outside of the district.
She said her other priorities include passing a statewide bell-to-bell — all day — cellphone ban and enhancing funding programs to compensate student teachers.
Co-Chair Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, did not respond to a request for comment.
Committee Ranking Member Sen. Eric Berthel, R-Watertown, said he hopes to pass legislation that would improve the 2023 Right to Read law, which required schools to adopt curricula aligned with the “science of reading” — methods for teaching reading through five key skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Berthel said he and Leeper worked with advocates to address concerns about the law as it was originally passed.
Ranking House Member Lezlye Zupkus, R-Prospect, said she’d like to see the General Assembly focus on “mandate relief” — that is, rolling back the “hundreds and hundreds” of legal requirements public schools in Connecticut are subject to.
Fixing the Foundation
Critics have argued that failing to tie baseline state funding to the inflation rate has cost school districts millions, perhaps billions, of dollars.
According to the School and State Finance Project, Connecticut’s baseline funding rate of $11,525 wasn’t calculated based on an analysis of “the actual costs associated with educating a general education student.” More pressing, the rate hasn’t been raised since 2013 — even though costs have increased. If it had been tied to inflation, as tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that $11,525 in 2013 would be nearly $16,000 today.
In addition to that, Leeper said she wants to start phasing out the tuition districts pay when a student chooses to enroll elsewhere — in a magnet or charter school, for example. The state cost share would rise in tandem and eventually take over local districts’ portion of costs associated with that student.
Berthel said tying the ECS formula to inflation might be too much of a challenge for the Appropriations Committee, which he also sits on, to get done this year: “I just don’t know that our budget in the current cycle that we’re in would support that,” Berthel said.
As for phasing out the local share when students enroll out-of-district, Berthel said he could “go either way” but expressed some hesitation.
A ‘Bell-to-Bell’ Ban
Last year, the General Assembly passed a law requiring local boards of education to adopt a policy regulating cellphone use. The policy had to be based on official guidance from the State Board of Education, which recommended removing phones from elementary and middle school classrooms entirely while requiring high school students to keep them off and out of sight. That stops short of the full statewide bell-to-bell ban Leeper said she’s pushing for this year.
The Connecticut Association of Boards of Education President Meg Scata said she thinks a statewide ban is unnecessary. She said districts are addressing the problem locally already, and some students — for example, multilingual learners or those receiving special education — need their phones for instructional purposes.
Both ranking members expressed views similar to Scata’s.
“Banning, another mandate. I’m for schools having a policy, but let them have their own policy,” Zupkus said.
Student Teacher Pay
Many Connecticut districts need teachers, but becoming a teacher can be expensive. At a summit at the Capitol last month, Hannah Spinner, a graduate student studying education at the University of Connecticut, called the costs of teacher training “astronomical.”
“The return on investment that many people who want to become teachers see in the education profession is just not worth it to them,” Spinner said. “When you can accrue $100,000 in loans to get your degree to be able to teach, and then your starting salary is half that, that’s a problem.”
To help address the issue, Leeper said she’d like to enhance Connecticut’s support for student teachers. That could include expanding existing initiatives like the Aspiring Educators Scholarship, which gives up to $10,000 to students from certain Connecticut districts, or NextGen Educators, in which participating districts hire student teachers at a substitute pay rate.
Berthel expressed reservations about putting taxpayer dollars toward funding student teaching positions, which he noted are “part of their curriculum.” He said that lawmakers can help make Connecticut affordable by cutting taxes and removing the public benefits charge from electric bills.
Will Lawmakers Take Up Special Education, Homeschooling?
Leeper said she’s looking forward to reviewing reports from a special committee, established last year, known as the Building Educational Responsibility with Greater Improvement Networks Commission. The group was tasked with reviewing the state’s special education needs and providing suggestions. It’s not clear whether that will translate into a bill during this year’s session.
Homeschooling has also received heightened attention following two high-profile cases last year. The cases, along with a report from the Office of the Child Advocate— which concluded lax regulations have meant some children aren’t getting a proper education, and the system has been used to cover up abuse — prompted questions about whether the state does enough to oversee homeschooling.
Although both Zupkus and Berthel said the aforementioned cases were horrifying, neither considered new homeschooling regulations an effective response.
“No piece of legislation would have stopped [those cases] from happening. If there was, I think we would all be on board to put something in place,” Zupkus said.
Echoing what some homeschool advocates have argued, Berthel said the main failure lies with the Department of Children and Families. “I think maybe we need to fix some of our own internal mechanisms first before we start putting these directives on these families,” Berthel said.
