Education Reforms On Hold Until Funding Is Arranged

Connecticut lawmakers passed a series of school reforms last legislative session meant to capture funds from the Obama administration's Race to the Top. As WNPR's Andrew Huston reports, the state didn't get that money and now may have to delay new reforms.

The 2018 class of Connecticut high school seniors is poised to face a new set of tough graduation requirements:

"There are greater requirements in Math, Science, Technology, English. You could have a student today who could get out high school without having taken biology, or without having taken Algebra I. That would not be possible under our new standards."

That was Rep. Andy Fleischmann, House Chair of the General Assembly's Education Committee. He says the price of implementing those changes is about $25 million over two years.

When the legislature passed the reform law last year, it failed to recieve any of the $175 million expected from the federal Race to the Top program to pay for it. Without new money from the state, Fleischmann sees the only way to keep these measures viable is to postpone them:

"It would be totally unfair for us to require local school districts to pay for these reforms at the same time as they're undergoing their own fiscal crises. So it is hard for me to imagine that my colleagues in the general assembly would not all agree with me, on both sides of the aisle, that if we can't find the state funds to pay for reform, we have to roll back the implementation dates."

Fleischmann  says he wants to keep the current timeline for reform in place and he says the state should try to find the funds to do so.

For WNPR, I'm Andrew Huston.