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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

College Students and Prisoners Skewing Education Funding Grants?

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Thursday, November 17, 2011   

HARTFORD, Conn. - Connecticut's Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula is meant to guarantee equal educational opportunity for all the state's children by taking into consideration differences in both student need and towns' ability to pay for education. Gov. Dannel Malloy has convened a task force scheduled to meet today to consider changes to the state's ECS formula to make it fairer.

Orlando Rodriguez, senior policy fellow with Connecticut Voices for Children, points to one problem with the formula that could result in disproportionate funding: The income data is more than 10 years old, pre-dating major income shifts.

"What has happened, basically, is that in our upper-income towns, income has continued to increase. That's not reflected in these formulas, so certain towns have higher income than they did in 1999 but they're still being funded as if it were 1999."

Connecticut Voices recommends that the state restructure all education funding through a transparent, planned and research-based process, rather than simply plugging in the ECS formula.

Another problem Rodriguez has with the formula is that it is skewed because it counts residents of college dorms and prisons in determining a town's population - even though neither group has anything to do with K-12 education - and both groups are low-income.

"What happens is that towns that have large populations of college dorm residents and prisoners are disproportionately favored in the funding formulas."

State law mandates how much of their local funds towns must budget for education, Rodriguez says, but not how much they actually spend, and anything left at the end of the year goes back to the town.

"What we're seeing within local education budgets is a shifting of education dollars to non-education purposes. We need to make sure that dollars that are collected for education are spent on education."


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