Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Friday doubled cuts in state aid to cities and towns to help achieve big, unassigned savings ordered by the General Assembly in the recently passed bipartisan budget.
Nearly two-thirds of the additional municipal aid cuts – $58 million of the $91 million in reductions – fall on the state’s middle- and high-income school districts.
The cuts come on top of those the adopted budget already specified for the Education Cost Sharing Grant, the state’s chief vehicle for aid to local schools. In total, schools are set to lose $89.6 million from this grant – a 4.4 percent reduction compared to last fiscal year.
The cuts already approved by the legislature did not follow a formula, but the legislature promised to implement one starting next year. Rather, the adopted budget shielded the state’s 33 lowest-performing school districts and cut every other district by 5 percent.
The governor took a roughly similar approach, cutting the struggling districts only slightly and cutting the remaining districts by 13 percent.
Legislative leaders took issue with targeting education aid, but the adopted budget required the governor to cut a total of $880 million without directing where to make the reductions.
Select your town in the map below to see how it fares for state education aid. The table below the map shows how much overall state aid your town will receive from the major state grants, combining education and non-education grants. In addition, $27 million is being cut from lesser state grants, most of which are dedicated for various education programs that help struggling districts. Those cuts were not available on a town-by-town and are not included in the table below. (See those cuts here)