Want to fix inequities in school funding? Some say property tax reform is solution.
/by Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, CT Mirror 12/9/20
Three years have passed since lawmakers celebrated passing a budget that aimed to narrow the vast disparities in school spending by zip code by funneling millions more each year to struggling districts.
But that $61 million infusion into the state’s primary education grant hasn’t come close to helping the state’s poorest towns keep up with the increased spending in the state’s wealthiest districts, leading religious leaders on Tuesday evening to call on top Democratic legislators to rethink the “racist and classist” way they fund schools. The coalition has invited Gov. Ned Lamont to be their guest next week.
“The purpose of our meeting today is to draw your attention to the pain and suffering of our communities, caused by the racist and classist school funding system based predominantly on where you live, and property taxes, and where your zip code determines your educational future. We don’t believe that should be so,” said Jeremy Williams, a pastor at Phillips Metropolitan CME Church in Hartford, as he kicked off the forum being hosted Tuesday by Faith Acts, a coalition of religious leaders from 80 churches throughout Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport.
“We thank each of you for the progress you’ve made on school funding, especially in 2017, but we haven’t reached the promised land. The way that Connecticut funds public education is racist, and classist. There are vast spending inequities,” said Iona Smith Nze, a pastor at Bethel AME Church in Bridgeport.
Several participants pointed to the state’s per-student rundown, which shows New Haven spends $18,142 per student compared to almost identical amounts in neighboring Orange and Woodbridge, two communities whose students have demonstrably fewer needs because of housing policies that make it unaffordable for lower-income residents to live there.
In Bridgeport, $15,329 is spent on each student, compared to $19,160 next door in Fairfield and $22,623 in Westport.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, kids in Westport went home with iPads to do distance learning, while kids in the inner city went home with iHopes, where many of the kids in our community hope that they could get a computer and hope that the internet would work and hope that they would have food on the table,” said Danny Bland, a pastor at Mt. Calvary Revival Center in New Haven. “The pandemic didn’t create our educational inequities – we understand that – but they did, however exacerbate them,”
A screen grab of the education funding forum hosted Tuesday evening by FaithActs.
Despite Connecticut’s liberal reputation – and Democrats controlling the General Assembly for the last 23 years and the governor’s residence for nine – the state had one of the largest disparities in education spending between predominantly white and predominantly nonwhite districts, according to an analysis of 2016 fiscal year spending generated by EdBuild, a national think tank that advocates for school funding that levels the playing field. In Connecticut, that study found, districts where more than three-quarters of the students are white spent 17% more per pupil than those districts where fewer than one-quarter are white.
While sympathetic to the financial plight of school districts, several top legislators said during the forum that the solution needs to be broader than the state pouring more money into the education grant. The problem, they said, goes much deeper than that.
“Part of this is the uncomfortable conversation we have to have about property tax and tax reform, generally. We as a state can put additional dollars in [but] those discrepancies that we see between wealthy suburbs and our urban centers isn’t because the state’s not putting in 10 times as much into urban centers, it’s because so much wealth has been concentrated in our suburban areas because they use housing and zoning rules to segregate themselves,” said state Rep. Roland Lemar, a Democrat from New Haven and house chairman of the legislature’s Transportation Committee.
“We need to have a conversation about tax reform and property tax reform. We need to ask more of our high income earners,” Lemar added. “We need to ask more in the way of state government to fix this through property tax reform because we can’t keep putting this burden back on the city of New Haven, the city of Bridgeport … who have so many tremendous needs in their community to make up the difference, when a town like New Canaan can easily just throw a couple extra million dollars into their local schools.”
Property taxes account for 56% of all K-12 revenue in the state – putting Connecticut in second place nationally for relying on local property taxes, according to 2017 data from the U.S. Department of Education. The constant increases over the years in state aid directed largely at the poorest schools hasn’t resulted in a reduction in the share of K-12 spending being covered by local property taxes, state data shows.
