NORWALK, Conn. – Norwalk gets fewer educational funding dollars from the state than it got in 1975 when you adjust for inflation, according to a woman who has been fighting for 10 years to change the system.
That might change next spring, according to Dianne Kaplan deVries, project director for the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF). DeVries spoke with passion and confidence Tuesday to the Norwalk Board of Education about the 10-year CCJEF lawsuit against the state, set to go to trial in September, predicting that the preponderance of evidence will mean success and real change in Connecticut.
Winning won’t just mean a moral victory, she said. Experts working with CCJEF have proposals ready to provide legislators to right the system, should the judge rule in CCJEF’s favor, she said.
“It is important that those remedies be right or we will have frittered away the last 16½ years as far as I am concerned,” she said.
CCJEF vs. Rell was filed in 2005, when Jodi Rell was governor, having stepped up from lieutenant governor when Gov. John Rowland resigned in a corruption scandal. The complaint alleges inequality of educational opportunities and resultant harm to students because of the state’s educational funding system. The battle was waged until 2012 strictly by Yale University law students, whose volunteer contributions have made the “most important lawsuit in the history of Connecticut education” possible, she said.
“If our lawyer had been billing, we would be around $20 million in the hole … and we are by no means done yet,” she said.
In 2012, CCJEF appealed to Yale Alumni for help. As a result, Debevoise and Plimpton LLP is now lead counsel for the plaintiffs.
Norwalk is a plaintiff in the case. Former Mayor Alex Knopp signed Norwalk on and former Mayor Richard Moccia continued the city’s involvement. In March, Mayor Harry Rilling was named the to coalition’s steering committee.
Norwalk politicians frequently site the Connecticut Educational Cost Sharing (ECS) formula as being unfair. Last year, Gov. Dannel Malloy revamped the formula, only to see the factors that would have sent more money to Norwalk die in a legislative committee. DeVries said that since then, there has been a change that shows how unfair things are.
“Guess what happened this winter, in the 2014 legislative session? They completely abandoned that one-year formula,” deVries said. “Who creates a state aid formula and one year later disbands it and does whatever they want to? To this moment we still have no explanation about why so many towns got above that formula. Was it the squeaky wheels that got the money? Or was it throw a few pages down the stairs and whoever landed at the bottom got the extra money? Was it vote trading that got the money? That’s an absolute no-no.”
Norwalk schools are underfunded by at least $21.3 million a year, she said.
“This is the most conservative bottom number that it would be reasonable to think you ought to be having, and your children ought to be enjoying,” she said.
That’s according to an education adequacy cost study commissioned by CCJEF in 2004. It does not factor in the many state mandates since then, including Common Core State Standard, teacher evaluations and testing that requires technology, she said.
“What does it mean to have a free education if that education is lousy? And the standard by which you judge lousy or good continues to change as the world evolves,” she said. “(This trial) is our great legacy, our great contribution to the next 50 years or so of Connecticut education.”
Connecticut – ironically led by Gov. Dannel Malloy, who was a big supporter of the lawsuit when he was Stamford’s mayor – is “throwing the kitchen sink” at the lawsuit, including trying to argue that preschool education be excluded from the case, deVries said. While that motion hasn’t been dropped, it’s not likely to be heard because the state couldn’t find any experts to say that pre-K is not important, she said.
The trial is likely to take two or three months, thanks to a “determined” judge who is demanding that lawyers be in court four or five days a week, she said. The judge then has 120 days to make a decision, but an extension is likely, she said.
It will be broadcast on CT-N, she said. CCJEF will be blogging through the trial.
“The legislators will have heard the whole thing on CT-N and they will know the preponderance of the evidence is clearly on our side. Based on other states, the legislators don’t wait for the decision, they know what it’s going to be,” she said, predicting action.
“We have challenged the entire school funding system,” she said. “So we have got to go after all the categoricals, we have got to straighten out the way that those magnet schools are being funded — the vo-ag programs, which are so essential to so many kids and have lots of empty seats because the state hasn’t been funding them enough. I mean, this is an outrage. The charter schools, we don’t want them taking money out of the municipally based public schools so we’ve got to find a funding source for them. Or stick it to the state. Let them continue funding them. They want to found them, then let them pay for them. The technical high school system – that system has been underfunded for years. I mean, they have been trying to catch up in the last couple of years, but it’s a very little and very late to be trying to do that.”
DeVries said plaintiffs don’t have the responsibility to come up with proposals to resolve inequities, but it was decided early on that CCJEF would take a different approach.
“Why don’t we, with our experts elsewhere outside the state, get those proposals on the table and explain them, and then work with (legislators) a little bit as they tweak them and make them to be their own? But this notion that lay people can devise complex systems such as this is lunacy,” she said. “That’s why school finance is in such bad shape across the nation. You can’t politically appoint a group and say you go write the formula. It doesn’t work that way. You need real expertise of people who do this for a living.”
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