Earlier this week, the Connecticut Council of Small Towns (COST) held a meeting reviewing this year’s legislative session. One of the key points discussed in the meeting was additional financial support provided to schools and special education resources this session, as well as their financial implications on the municipalities that fund them.
COST’s Executive Director, Elizabeth Gara was joined by representatives of various other stakeholder groups, including Lisa Hammersley, Executive Director of the School + State Finance Project.
Hammersley said the School + State Finance Project is a “non-partisan, nonprofit policy organization” that uses “data in order to develop policy solutions to increase equitable funding of education.” Hammersley outlined the additional help this year’s legislative session has allocated to municipal education funding, while noting that funding gaps still remain.
Hammersley listed off and explained the various methods the state legislature has taken to increase educational funding, the two biggest being an additional $150 million allocated to the state’s Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant in the biennium and the creation of another $30 million grant program, the Special Education and Expansion Development (SEED) grant.
Additionally, Hammersley noted that the state is allocating an extra $12.5 million to Regional Education Service Centers (RESCs), a competitive $9.9 million grant for the creation of in-house special education programming that begins in 2027, and an additional $2.5 million for the creation of two new charter schools in Stamford and New Haven.
Hammersley recounted the history of the state’s ECS grant, a revenue-sharing measure meant to equitably allocate funding to disproportionately underfunded districts. ECS is based on a complex formula, which factors in parameters such as district wealth and level of student need to decide how funds municipalities receive.
“Over the past few years, we have been working with the General Assembly to kind of clean up the education funding system that the state has,” said Hammersley. “Depending on your operator, the amount of state support that you receive varies, and the rules with regards to how much a choice operator can charge in general education tuition billing also varies.”
Hammersley said that the legislature’s allocation of an additional $150 million to the ECS grant, will allow for a “partial extension” of the ECS to “choice students”, or students enrolled in publicly funded alternative schools, such as magnet schools, charter schools, or AgriScience programs.
Hammersley said that while the legislature has been working to improve upon fully funding its ECS grants, having added an additional $40 million in the 2025 budget to ECS reimbursements and ensuring that added $40 million will continue to be provided in the biennium, it is still falling short of its statutory reimbursements. Furthermore, Hammersley projected that this problem is likely to worsen as excess cost claims have increased significantly in the past five years.
“Uncapped excess cost claims are growing at an extremely fast rate, and they’ve grown by over 70% over the past five years,” said Hammersley.
Hammersley said that while the state has increased ECS funding by 57% over the same period, from $141 million to $221 million, the program still falls short of reaching its statutory reimbursement requirements. Hammersley projected that claims will increase by $20 million over the next two years, and said, “because claims are going up, you are likely going to be level funded from the state of Connecticut under the excess cost grant, and your percentage reimbursement will likely go down.”
On the topic of infrastructure, she noted the legislature also heeded the suggestions of COST and the School + State Finance Project in the creation of an infrastructure grant program, the District Repair and Improvement Program (DRIP).
“After talking to stakeholders and after talking to superintendents, we started to feel like there was a gap in state support for school building projects,” said Hammersley. “You have the local school construction program for major renovation or new builds. However, we thought that there was a gap with regards to minor capital repairs.”
The state will provide $30 million annually for DRIP, which Hammersley noted is modeled under the state’s existing LoCIP (Local Capital Improvement Program) grant. Hammersley said that funds provided by the grants would go directly to local boards of education, and that they will have broad discretion in how the funds can be used.
“And really, the funds could be utilized any way that your board of education deems suitable,” said Hammersley of the LoCIP program. “The statute is very broad, so as long as it’s a repair to a school building or grounds, you’re covered, and you could utilize your funds.”
Hammersley said that in order to ensure that the grant remains a sufficient and reliable source of funding, “we will need to work with the administration to get these funds put on a bond commission agenda.”
After finishing her assessment of the previous session, Hammersley set the agenda for next year’s session. She said the primary goals she believes municipal and education stakeholders should advocate for are raising the base amount of funding the ECS formula uses to account for inflation, eliminating general education tuition billing, which is tuition charged to districts who send students to alternative schools, and to increase the annual funds allocated to the new SEED grant.
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