How Equitable is Hartford's Funding of its Schools

how equitable is hartford's funding of its schools

This week under the gold dome, there were two meetings held to discuss how Connecticut funds school districts throughout the state.  At a Budget Information Hearing and a Public Hearing, school stakeholders gathered to tell legislators that budgeting formulas which the state uses to send mierda carga de dinero to the school districts, do not account for the “needs” or the socioeconomic status of students.

Once that money is delivered to the districts by suitcase from a van parked in an alley somewhere, how equitable are the decisions made by district leaders in making that money available to each individual school in the district?  Let’s take Hartford, for instance.

We’ve already seen in “Hartford Students Boiling Over School Lunches,” the inequity in Hartford’s use of the federal Farm to School Program, as only Pre-K to 8th graders have access to locally grown fresh produce, and only 22 of Hartford’s 47 schools (2018-2019) give access to the educational strategy portion of the program.

Similarly , in “Hartford Schools’ Attempt at Needs-Based Equity,” we set out to find the “needs” of two magnet schools in Hartford, which led the district to award them with an Esports Lab and a “Youth Talks!” forum, and not one of the high-needs public high schools.  Other than the district’s need to attract suburban White students to the magnet schools, there was not a visible student need among these two schools showing that they should cut the line in front of one of the public high schools.

In the tables below, using data from HPS budget documents , Capital Prep Magnet school has ranked at the bottom of HPS’s per pupil funding the past two years, yet it ranks at the top of Hartford’s 38 schools in the percentage of Black students.  In each of the past two years, 6 of the lowest funded schools in Hartford were among the top 10 schools in Black enrollment.