Early, K-12, and Higher Education

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

Access to childcare and early childhood education is critical to closing achievement gaps in learning. It particularly assists children from low-income families and children of color. Care 4 Kids, Connecticut’s Early Childhood Education subsidy program, provides a good start at addressing these gaps, but even that program comes with a heavy fee of up to ten percent of a family’s total gross annual wages, and only very low-income families are eligible. Following the recommendation of Connecticut Voices for Children, I advocate for expanding eligibility to middle class families and reducing the fee to make this program more accessible. To incentivize participation, we should also streamline paperwork for providers who receive state reimbursements.

K-12 EDUCATION

Our public education system suffers from insufficient and unequal state support. Education Cost Sharing funding is especially insufficient now, when Federal pandemic-related funding from the American Rescue Plan is ending. The dearth of federal education dollars creates a fiscal cliff that is resulting in severe budget cuts or negative program changes in Bridgeport, Trumbull, and Monroe. And while ECS funding in some wealthier suburbs in Fairfield County continues to go up, state education funding for Bridgeport, Trumbull, and Monroe has not kept up. Following the recommendation of the School and State Finance Project, I will advocate for increased state funding for the schools in our district. I will propose tying the ECS formula to inflation to reduce its volatility. I will use our state universities and community colleges to create more effective pipelines to address teacher and paraprofessional shortages. And I will investigate ways to improve the ECS formula to reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in student learning.

HIGHER EDUCATION

Connecticut’s state universities and community colleges have been underfunded for years. Programs have not kept up with inflation. This is critical because we can use our higher education system to produce pipelines to resolve critical labor shortages in education, health care, and technology programs. I would work to provide sustainable funding for Connecticut’s public colleges and universities and collaborate with those universities to provide pathways to employment.