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Danbury board urges protection of Alliance-funded positions, seeks COLA indexing in CABE resolution

Danbury School Board (committee meeting) · November 11, 2025

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Summary

Board members said recent changes to Alliance-district designations raised uncertainty about whether funding follows the designation and urged CABE to back language maintaining full ECS funding to all districts, with separate grants and a hold‑harmless/COLA approach to protect Alliance-funded salaries.

Danbury School Board members discussed a proposed CABE resolution (2.9) that would seek to maintain full Education Cost Sharing funding to all districts, explicitly include Alliance districts and create separate grants for Alliance reform efforts, along with language to protect Alliance-funded positions against inflation-driven salary growth.

Kara (board member) said some districts were removed from the Alliance list last year while Danbury remained; she and others worried the designation change might have affected funding. "The lot of districts got dropped off the list, but Danbury remained on it," Kara said, and added she drafted refined language to mirror CABE format that captures the need for a COLA or hold‑harmless clause.

Board members noted ECS is currently described as 'fully funded' under the formula, but without automatic cost-of-living indexing the district’s general fund could end up covering contractual step or column increases for staff paid from Alliance grants. "If we're currently spending Alliance at a 100... as those salaries continue to grow, suddenly, Alliance won't be enough to fund them anymore," Michael said.

The board asked Kara and Michael to finalize proposed wording and circulate it to the group ahead of Wednesday's in-person community relations meeting. They also discussed parallel strategies: pressing CABE to adopt the language and working through the local legislative delegation to introduce related statutory language if needed.

Next steps: Kara will circulate the refined draft; the board will review it at the next in-person meeting and decide whether to submit it to CABE as new resolution language.