Members of the panel working to close the state’s largest-in-the nation achievementgaps between low-income students and their peers have submitted possible remedies for lawmakers to consider: call it a suggestion box.
Suggestions range from providing laptops for every middle school student to take home to universal preschool and full-day kindergarten, a recommendation that was made in 2011. Mandatory recess and breakfast at the schools with large achievement gaps is also included in these draft recommendations released earlier this week.
This panel is expected to fine-tune this list over the next several months for the legislature to consider. One lingering question that remains with many of these suggestions is where the money is going to come from.
Luckily, that’s not this panel’s job to figure out: There’s another task force working to amend how schools are financed, and it’s meeting in Bridgeport Thursday night at the Aquaculture School.
Jacqueline was CT Mirror’s Education and Housing Reporter, and an original member of the CT Mirror staff, joining shortly before our January 2010 launch. Her awards include the best-of-show Theodore A. Driscoll Investigative Award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists in 2019 for reporting on inadequate inmate health care, first-place for investigative reporting from the New England Newspaper and Press Association in 2020 for reporting on housing segregation, and two first-place awards from the National Education Writers Association in 2012. She was selected for a prestigious, year-long Propublica Local Reporting Network grant in 2019, exploring a range of affordable and low-income housing issues. Before joining CT Mirror, Jacqueline was a reporter, online editor and website developer for The Washington Post Co.’s Maryland newspaper chains. Jacqueline received an undergraduate degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in public policy from Trinity College.
