CT House Speaker Confident on $170M School Funding Boost

House Speaker Matt Ritter said Monday he’s confident Connecticut lawmakers can secure a $170 million boost to public school funding this year, setting up a final push to pull Gov. Ned Lamont toward a number that education advocates say still falls short.

The Hartford Democrat’s announcement came hours after municipal leaders gathered at the state Capitol to demand more state aid, repeating warnings that local budgets are cracking under the weight of rising education costs that state funding hasn’t kept pace with.

The $170 million figure is a step up from the $150 million House Democrats were discussing a month ago. It’s also well above the $100 million floor Lamont offered last Thursday, itself a notable shift for a governor who included no such additional funding in his February budget proposal.

Ritter said he thinks there’s room to move the governor further.

“I am confident we can get the governor to be comfortable with that number,” Ritter said.

One open question is whether the money lands inside the formal state budget or flows from a separate reserve. Education advocates have warned that a one-time side payment could disappear in future budget cycles, leaving districts back where they started. Ritter pushed back on that concern directly.

“If we pay for 170 [million] in ECS and then next year say, ‘We didn’t mean it, it was one time,’ you’d get zero votes for that concept,” Ritter said.

ECS, the Education Cost Sharing grant, is the state’s primary school funding mechanism for municipalities.

Republicans offer a competing plan

Republicans have put forward their own proposal they say would deliver $335 million to schools, but the math depends on two uncertain bets: winning a legal fight against New York over work-from-home income tax receipts, and eliminating health coverage for some undocumented residents. Neither outcome is guaranteed, and Democrats haven’t shown interest in the tradeoffs involved.

Municipal leaders aren’t satisfied

The pressure from towns and cities isn’t letting up. Municipal officials who packed the statehouse Monday said the current formula is broken, and $170 million doesn’t fix it. Joe DeLong, executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, didn’t mince words.

“Let me tell you, $100 million put into education this year is probably a D-minus,” DeLong said.

He called for more. “We’ve heard numbers like $180 million. I think $180 million should be a floor, not a ceiling,” DeLong added.

Mary Calorio, president of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, put the structural problem in concrete terms. Five or six years ago, the state’s Education Cost Sharing grant covered roughly 25% of many small towns’ education costs. Now it covers about 15%. That 10-point drop is real money that towns have to find somewhere else.

Not a small gap.

“That’s a big gap for them, for our property taxpayers, to absorb, and there’s nowhere else for the towns to go,” Calorio said.

She also told legislators that education already consumes the lion’s share of local budgets, often exceeding 70% and approaching 80% of total municipal spending in smaller communities. When state aid falls, property taxes rise. There’s no other lever.

What this means for Fairfield County towns

The funding squeeze hits differently depending on where you live. Greenwich and Darien receive comparatively little in ECS grants because the formula weights need and local capacity, so the state’s share of their school budgets was already thin. But towns like Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Stamford rely heavily on ECS, and any sustained shortfall there translates directly into classroom cuts or tax increases.

For the many Fairfield County towns in the middle, the special education cost surge is the sharper problem. Special education spending has grown faster than almost any other budget line in Connecticut schools, and the state’s reimbursement rate hasn’t kept up. That gap lands on local budgets, which means it lands on local taxpayers.

The coalition pushing for higher ECS funding, as CT Mirror has tracked throughout this session, spans teachers, administrators, students, and city officials, a wide enough group that legislative leaders are clearly feeling the weight.

The General Assembly faces a budget deadline at the end of June. Ritter’s $170 million target, if it holds, still needs Lamont’s sign-off, and municipal advocates are already on record saying it isn’t enough to reverse years of cost-sharing erosion in Connecticut public schools.