by Jamil Ragland CTNewsJunkie
HARTFORD, CT — Connecticut needs to take action to raise revenue for schools in an expected special legislative session later this year, a union leader said recently.
Fred Redmond, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, in a discussion at Hartford’s Moylan Elementary School said the response was necessary to offset spending cuts at the federal level.
“Here in Connecticut, the governor has an opportunity to address the budget shortfalls that will only be exacerbated by the cuts in federal funding,” Redmond said. “We’re not asking for something that the governor does not have the ability to do. It’s about holding people accountable. This is about calling people out. This is about saving our children.”
Redmond called education cuts an attack on working class people.
Shellye Davis, secretary treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and president of the Hartford Federation of Paraeducators, AFT Local 2221, said low pay and limited resources are driving paraeducators, who care for children with the greatest needs, away from the profession.
“I am actually proud to represent thousands of para-educators in classrooms across Connecticut who are the unseen hands holding up our educational system, holding up our kids with the most special needs, our most vulnerable kids every day,” she said. “And the problem right now is we have vacancies. Last year we had over 80 vacancies, which means our kids are not getting their services.”
Representatives for higher education said the fiscal challenges facing schools reflect a larger shift towards attacking education. Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and president of the Trinity College American Association of University Professors, said higher education was facing an “existential threat by an authoritarian regime” that seeks to control how history is taught to Americans.
“So what does that look like in practice? It looks like a weaponization of civil rights law with these insane redefinitions of what counts as critical race theory, what counts as diversity, equity, and inclusion, reinterpreted by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, … and then using those redefinitions to attack institutions and individual faculty, accusing individual faculty of violating civil rights for the simple reason that we are teaching what we are trained to teach,” he said. “It means abductions in plain view of faculty, international faculty and students, because of what they say, because of the political positions that they have taken, and because of the opinion pieces that they have written.”
Bringing the discussion back to Connecticut, state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, acknowledged that even emptying the rainy day fund wouldn’t be enough to sustain the state’s education system in light of potential federal cuts. She said it’s critical that the state provide new sources of revenue to fund schools.
“We need to think about long-term solutions, like how are we going to have a specific funding stream to help education and going into the future?” she said. “And that’s where I believe the 1% can do their part. Even if it’s 1% of either their property value or their income, we need a funding stream that goes far into the future.”
Hochadel also said leaders need to have a conversation about rethinking the educational cost sharing (ECS) formula that the state uses to provide funding to public school districts.
“If we don’t take care of this problem now, then what will happen in the future?” she said. “If we have no teachers, because nobody wants to be in the profession, where are we going to be? We’re in a crisis and people need to know that. And we have to take action now.”