Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Friday offered a much more restrained redistribution of state education aid dollars from better-off communities to impoverished ones. Instead of sending the 30 lowest-achieving districts an additional $300 million, as he proposed in May, his new plan would funnel them $11 million this fiscal year.
But this latest budget proposal also cuts overall state education aid by $113 million – instead of flat-funding education aid as his May budget plan would have done.
Add in the cuts to non-education aid and the new teacher pension contributions municipalities would make — and communities overall would lose $198 million in resources next fiscal year, a drop of about 8 percent. (See town-by-town totals below.) The proposal also would set aside $46 million in unassigned aid for “municipal restructuring” of struggling cities or towns.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin says he needs nearly $40 million in additional state aid this fiscal year to avoid insolvency. Malloy and legislative leaders have said all year they anticipate the new budget would provide the necessary funds to help Hartford.
Calling it a “compromise budget,” the Democratic governor said he hopes it will help end the budget stalemate. Now 70 days into the fiscal year without a budget, huge cuts in state aid for schools loom if no budget is adopted by October. The state Supreme Court also is scheduled to hear appeals in a landmark school-funding lawsuit later this month following a Superior Court judge’s ruling that the way the state distributed education aid is irrational and unconstitutional.
Malloy has riled many legislators this year by proposing major cuts in municipal aid for better-off towns. Now, he hopes to ameliorate those concerns by scaling back that redistribution.
Currently two-thirds of the $2 billion the state provides in its primary education grants to towns goes to the 30 lowest-performing districts. In May, Malloy proposed boosting that to 78 percent.
On Friday, he proposed sending 70 percent to those districts in this fiscal year, although that share results largely from cutting overall aid, holding the struggling districts harmless and cutting aid that other towns receive, as opposed to giving poor districts big increases.
In the next fiscal year, those struggling districts would get 71 percent of state education aid.
Here’s how the proposed changes break down:
- Thirty-nine towns would receive no state education aid – a slight increase from the 31 communities that Malloy proposed in his May budget plan. Elimination of aid to those communities would save the state $26.6 million next fiscal year.
- $99 million for another 92 towns would be cut.
- $11.8 million would be sent to 21 mostly low-performing districts
- 18 struggling districts would be flat-funded
Glastonbury schools would lose the most of any town — $6.5 million — followed by Newtown, Cheshire and West Hartford, which stand to lose just over $4 million each.
Waterbury would be the biggest winner with a $2.8 million increase in education aid, followed by Danbury, Stamford and New Britain, which would each get just over $1 million more.
Other municipal aid also is cut — largely in the form of the state’s contribution to teachers pension costs. See the bottom-line total for all aid for each town below.