Melissa Bailey File Photo
Looney.
State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney told a group of educators, parents and legislators this week that he believes it is time to regionalize the Connecticut’s school districts just as the state’s probate courts were recently consolidated.
“Frankly, we have too many school system bureaucracies,” Looney said. “We have too many administrators.”
Looney, who represents New Haven and Hamden, was one of several panelists at a Branford Educational Forum designed to inform the public about the impact of a recent landmark State Supreme Court decision requiring the state to provide all public school students with an adequate education. The forum was held at the Walsh Intermediate School Monday night.
The case, “CCJ EF v. Rell,” which stands for the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding, v. Gov. M. Jodi Rell, was brought by the Yale Law School’s Education Adequacy Project in 2005. The education clinic operates under the direction of faculty; two of its students argued the successful case before the high court in 2008. Two current students were on hand at the forum to discuss the case.
The CCJEF case. decided by the state’s highest court in a 4 – 3 decision, says that the state’s students are entitled under the state constitution to an adequate education. The case will ultimately transform how the state’s schools are funded. A trial, set to begin in 2014, perhaps earlier, will eventually force the state to act – unless the state legislature does so sooner.
In an interview, one of the law students, Jomaire Crawford, said that “with the case’s trial date several years away, many of the educators in attendance utilized the forum as a purposeful push to encourage settlement talks.” She said the three local shoreline legislators who attended the forum ” embraced the idea. Our client welcomes the opportunity to work in concert with the State to design a constitutional system.”
Prof. Bob Solomon, who oversees the Yale education clinic, said a status conference is set for Tuesday with Superior Court Judge Marshall Berger, who oversees a complex litigation court in Hartford. The task before the class is to find experts in a variety of educational areas, from special education, to the state’s funding formula, to English language learners, to pre‑k issues, to have them research and write reports and then be deposed. “It does take a long time,” he said.
This is the latest in a series of Supreme Court rulings that have required the legislature to act on the state of the state’s schools. In the 1977 decision in “Horton v. Meskill,” the state legislature was ordered to equalize education spending. In 1996 in “Sheff vs. O’Neill,” the state’s highest court ordered the legislature to deal with desegregation.
Sen. Looney’s is a crucial voice on how new legislation might be drawn as a result of “CCJEF v. Rell,” which will loom over the legislature when it begins its session in January. He was one of several speakers who spoke about the impact of the current court decision, how far it had come, how far it still had to go. The Coalition includes cities, towns, local boards of education, statewide professional education associations, teacher and other unions, parents, students and taxpayers.
“Lawsuits have been helpful over time,” Looney told an audience of about 75 people, in “keeping us focused on the issues.” He discussed “Horton v. Meskill,” saying “we have been grappling with that for the past 33 years.” He spoke of “Sheff v. O”Neill,” and how the legislature is still struggling with implementing that 1996 decision.
“The most recent Supreme Court decision from this past spring is, I think, a decision that will help us focus on what does it mean to have a guaranteed level of quality,” Looney added. “Because clearly in our state the single biggest challenge is the achievement gap that we see between low income, usually minority students, on the one hand and higher, affluent students on the other.”
At the same time, Looney is aware of the costs of education in a state facing the additional challenge of what he termed “a sort of Balkanization of responsibility.” The state has 169 separate municipalities. “all jealously protective of their own local turf at a time when economies of scale are going to be necessary,” he said.
“Frankly I believe we need to have more regional school districts in Connecticut. And that will be a very controversial thing to do because it is not in our tradition. But I think we need to move in that direction. One of the things we achieved just last year, and it was somewhat of a surprise, is that we consolidated the 117 probate districts in our state down to 54. That was a significant achievement in regionalism. It was painful and it put some long-term incumbent judges competing against one another, but overall all that was a significant step forward in providing a better regional based plan.
“We need something like that, I think, in education,” Looney said. “I think it will be even more controversial than it was in the probate system.”
He also said there would be a need to increase the state income tax which, he said, was “more moderate than in neighboring states.”
Asked after his talk about the role of unions, Looney said, “Yes, I know. That is going to be part of the challenge. We are going to have to deal with that.”
State Rep. Pat Widlitz, who recently won reelection for a ninth term and serves as a deputy majority leader, represents Guilford and parts of Branford in the assembly.
She told the audience that the pressure of the Supreme Court’s most recent school decision will help the legislative body move ahead. “We have a new governor and a new legislature session and with the pressure, which is a good thing, the pressure of a lawsuit like this, making us deal with this head on, I think the time is right to work on this and we will do so very enthusiastically,” she said.
Looney told the audience, one keenly aware of high property taxes, that “our goal for a very long time is to increase the state’s overall share of the cost of public education.
“Connecticut taxpayers, especially those on the shoreline, pay virtually the entire cost of funding public schools through the property tax.” Looney observed that difficult budget battles over the last several years have produced “some backsliding in moving toward that goal.”
Afterwards Looney was asked if his plan involved consolidating school systems along their geographical county lines.
“Potentially,” he said. “That is one of the ways we could look at it. We have to begin to engage thinking about these things in ways more than town by town because otherwise we won’t be able to find the way to fund the system in an equitable way and at the same time in a way that people will believe is financially responsible,” he said.
“We know this idea will be hugely controversial. All of our towns are very protective of their own little turf,” Looney said. “But I think if we are going to do it we have to provide more support for public education. But at the same time the state is struggling with its budget and we have to find cost savings and efficiencies.”
Will he actually try to do something this legislative session? “I would hope so,” Looney said. “Out of necessity. We will be talking about that. But I think the time has come to move in that direction because otherwise we will not be able to provide the support we need.”
Dianne Kaplan deVries, the project manager of the CCJEF, told the audience that Gov.-elect Dan Malloy was an early supporter of the coalition project.
“He knows the issues very well,” she said. She presented a comprehensive Power Point presentation of the issues. A number of towns and cities have signed on to the coalition project. Branford was an early supporter. State. Rep. Lonnie Reed and Board of Education chair Frank Carrano pressed for Branford’s involvement.
Reed, too, praised Gov.-elect Malloy, saying “he is an education governor. He is exceptionally well known for what he did for education in the city of Stamford. We are excited that we will have him in the governor’s office where we hope he will create the architecture for how we prioritize these issues.”
Carrano, who served as the master of ceremonies for the gathering, spent 35 years of his life as a teacher and union leader in the New Haven public schools. He said he knows well the trials of urban poverty and their relationship to the public schools.
“I first heard about this organization a number of years ago. And it occurred to me as I made the transition to Branford, I began to understand that as much as I had lobbied very strongly for the needs of the city’s schools when I was involved in those schools, I recognized that when I became involved in the Branford public schools that there were needs here that were not being met. And the reason why those needs weren’t being met was that we didn’t have the resources.”
“So I embraced the principles of CCJEF,” he said, “because what it is suggesting is that the whole process through which we fund public school education in Connecticut needs to be rethought and redesigned because communities such as Branford, Guilford, Madison and East Haven are places where the taxpayers fund virtually all costs of the public schools, whether they can afford to or not. That suggests to me that this is something that needs to be changed.”
Hamlet Hernandez, Branford’s new school superintendent of schools, said he understands this scenario well even though Hamden, where he grew up, is not on the shoreline.
“My parents were truly struggling with the fact that the taxes that they were paying were more than their mortgage payment when they bought their house in 1968,” Hernandez said.
“They were very committed to public education because they saw the value it had provided for our family and their three children. So they continued to contribute, but it did get to a point where they could no longer do that,” he said. “So I certainly can empathize with the reality that the funding structure is creating on taxpayers and in our community. I am cognizant of it and concerned about it because I have lived it.”
Carrano suggested strongly that a new system of funding be undertaken by the legislature.
Currently the education cost sharing formula is not based on income, but on the size of a town’s grand list, and if a town happens to have a shoreline, a town’s ranking may be high but only because of its real estate. Sometimes the residents living in third-generation houses cannot afford the taxes that go along with that house.
When the forum was over, Carrano said he believes that changing the funding formula and other aspects of the law “is a legislative decision. Therefore, we would like to see the legislature take responsibility for it and not wait for a judge to mandate what they do. They have a responsibility.”
As for Looney’s idea of regionalizing the state’s school districts? Carrano slowly smiled. “I don’t see it that way,” he said. “You know, local control is it around here.”
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The Democrats answer to upgrading city schools. Take the poor kids from the city and put them in the suburbian schools and the suburb kids into the city schools. The result is to destroy all the schools, make them all equally bad and thereby give equal education or lack there of to all. Private schools will be the beneficiaries as will the public school unions because since everyone will end up remdial, more teachers will be needed. A key ingredient to succesful schools is involved parents, as well as teachers who are appreciated. The teacher pay issue is not the main issue although the unions would have you believe that. The Dems are only interested in increasing union power so they can get re-elected. Cutting down on the number of administrators is not the answer. We can't let local control of schools get diluted.