![]() The public school students who need the most support live in districts with the lowest levels of per-pupil school funding, the worst staffing shortages, and the largest class sizes,” said Yordon. “Decades of under investment have made Connecticut’s public school system the worst in the nation for funding inequity. The Connecticut Education Association did not respond to a request for comment. According to the unions, charter funding has gone up more than 1,000 percent since 2000, while state funding for traditional public schools has gone up about 60 percent during that time.ĪFT Vice President for PreK-12 Educators Mary Yordon said in a statement to CT Examiner that the union was focused on getting more funding to the public schools. In an email sent to legislators, the unions argued that enrollment increases in charter schools have led to declines in the number of students in traditional public schools - and, with it, a loss of funding for those schools. But the state has yet to allocate the funding so that the schools can open, effectively leaving them in limbo. In 2018, the state Board of Education approved funding for two charter schools - the Danbury Prospect Charter School and the Norwalk Charter School for Excellence. But advocates for the change, like McCrory, have noted that since the 2015 change, no new charter schools have opened in Connecticut. The teachers unions argued in their email to legislators that the change was made to stop “deceptive ” from starting to enroll students before the state approved funding. The school then has to obtain a separate approval from the legislature as a whole to receive funding ![]() The legislation would also create a non-lapsing fund within the legislature specifically for funding new charter schools.Ĭurrently, because of a legislative change in 2015, the state Board of Education can only offer an initial certification to the charter school. The bill, if approved by the full legislature, would give the state Board of Education the ability to fund charter schools after approving an application - a process that the state originally followed. ![]() The email said that this bill would be one of the bills that CEA would be scoring as part of their “legislative report card” – an annual rating the union gives to each legislator based on the way they vote on certain bills. ![]() And they’re going to take score of how you all vote on this one piece of legislation.” “I have never, in my 19 years here, been - some people say, ‘vaguely threatened’ - about how I vote on a certain piece of legislation,” said McCrory. ![]() He said it put the teachers on the committee in a particularly bad position if they decided to vote against what their unions wanted. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, who co-chair the committee, referred to an email sent on Wednesday to the committee members from the Connecticut Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers as “placing a bulls-eye” on the members of the committee. HARTFORD – The state legislature’s Education Committee voted to advance a bill that would change the process for approving charter schools, despite fierce opposition from the state’s two largest teachers unions, who called the bill “an abdication of legislative control over tens of millions of dollars for public education.” ![]()
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