At a news conference on Monday, Connecticut Democrat party leaders identified two top priorities for the upcoming session: special education and housing.
The two bills that Democrats are looking to push forward to address these issues are “An Act Concerning the Quality and Delivery of Special Education Services in Connecticut,” (HB5001) and “An Act Concerning Housing and the Needs of Homeless Persons” (HB5002).
The former bill, if approved, will amend title 10 of the general statutes and “make revisions” to special education and related services in Connecticut. The latter would amend the general statutes to “lower housing costs, increase housing options and better support homeless persons.”
Neither bill contains details on specific changes, just overall goals for the future. During the first phase of the legislative process, senators and representatives submit proposed bills that state the goal of the bill. These proposals are usually a paragraph long and the details are determined later in the session.
“The biggest driver of municipal budgets is the Board of Ed budget, and the biggest driver of Board of Education budgets is special education,” Speaker of the House Rep. Matt Ritter (D-Hartford) said at the conference. “We could do more for municipal budgets and property tax stability. Probably one thing we can do…is take a hard look at special education.”
In total, special education consumed about 30% of the budget in Hartford, Ritter said.
Across the state of Connecticut, a cumulative $2.8 million was spent on special education during the 2022-23 academic year, according to EdSight, which is run by the state. During that same year, the cost per pupil can ranged between $14,000 to $38,000, depending on the school district. Most of that money comes through state and local funds, and a small percentage comes via federal funds.
“It’s not only money, it’s best practice,” Ritter said. “Hamden, Connecticut, for a long time, was a model for providing special education services, and Hamden, CT had families had families move into Hamden, because they wanted to take advantage of those services. And what it is it crushed the residential taxpayers in Connecticut, because they had to pay for all of that.”
And it’s not just about money.
“At some point there is a moral obligation to the state of Connecticut, to help towns and also to support these families so they’re not… shopping from town to town of where they can get the best services, when they’re already dealing with the fact that they have a child that is probably going through serious intellectual and physical disabilities in their struggle to get a public education here in the state of Connecticut,” Ritter said.
He is confident that the Republicans will play ball. The two parties are already working together, Ritter said.
Shortly after the press conference, the Connecticut Senate Republican Caucus release the following statement: “Yes, the legislature must continue to focus on implementing best practices regarding improving Connecticut’s education and housing policies. But we must not tweak or adjust our smart bipartisan fiscal guardrails which have served Connecticut taxpayers so well.”
The nine speakers at the press conference highlighted the connection between education policy and housing.
“There is a saying out there that education policy is housing policy and housing policy is education policy,” House Majority Leader Jason Rojas (D-East Hartford, Manchester) said. There were more Democratic legislatures who attended.
Housing is a “nexus” for other significant policy issues: health, economic opportunity, job access, transpiration and, of course, education, according to Rojas.
“There is no silver bullet solution to all of this,” Rojas said. “What you’ll see over the course of this legislative session that we’ve seen in the past is trying to identify the thousand veto points that exist out there, that make it really difficult to develop the housing where we needs it to be.”
That specific number is 100,000. The state of Connecticut is short both 100,000 housing units and 100,000 jobs—and that’s not a coincidence, according to Rep. Bob Duff (D-Darien, Norwalk).
“We know that the lack of housing is holding our economy back,” Duff said. “We know that too many people are spending too much money on their rent or their mortgage, because house prices are so high and one of the ways we can tackle that is a supply and demand issue. We need more supply to meet the demand.”
The Republicans also addressed the housing crisis in their statement: “Today’s alternations to the guardrails will lead to tomorrow’s tax increase on working and middle class families. We can’t afford tax hikes in this state. We must find efficiencies in our state budget which streamline government and eliminate wasteful spending.”
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If Ct is short 100k housing units and there are 110k undocumented in Ct. On Jan 20th Trump and Tom Homan will fix the glitch so everything will work itself out so no need to throw more money at the problem.