By Jacqueline Rabe Thomas and Keith M. Phaneuf
New Britain – Standing in the library of an elementary school that was at the center of a recent school-funding trial, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy today released his plans for redistributing existing levels of state education aid in ways he said would help the most impoverished school districts.
“There will be a shift. There will absolutely be a shift,” Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters when releasing his plans at Smalley Academy. “We are failing children because their parents are poor.”
His plan overhauls the highly criticized Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula by changing how student poverty is determined and creating a grant pool of roughly $575 million to help towns pay for special education.
The new pool of money – for educating physically or developmentally disabled students – would be funded almost entirely by redirecting nearly one-quarter of the $2 billion in state dollars that currently go toward the ECS grant and all of the so-called Excess Cost grant, which helps school districts pay for services for severely disabled students.
