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Public commenters urge council to direct state aid into Bridgeport schools
Summary
Speakers at the Bridgeport City public hearing urged the council to allocate newly available state aid to classrooms, with one calling for the entire $10 million in one-time funds to be added to education spending and others citing recent state increases that could raise available local school dollars.
Joseph Kolovic, a Bridgeport resident, told the council that the city is poised to receive roughly $10,000,000 in one-time state aid and urged the council to direct “every cent of the $10,000,000 in extra state aid into education” in addition to what the mayor proposed. “The only question is whether the council will make the difficult choices,” Kolovic said, arguing that recurring budgets should be stabilized through a minimum budget requirement so schools can plan.
Rob Traver praised recent state-level funding gains and the city’s advocacy, saying the state added “15,000,000” to the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula and an additional “10,300,000” from the Pequot Fund, and urged the council to apply available funds now and to pursue long-term remedies for the district’s funding gap.
Why it matters: speakers framed these dollars as a chance to prevent classroom cuts and stabilize recurring school funding. Kolovic said that even with proposed allocations, students would still be “nearly $19,000,000 short” of avoiding what he called catastrophic cuts, and he urged the council to close that gap by combining one-time and recurring commitments.
Council context: commenters referenced the mayor’s proposal to add $5,000,000 to schools; Kolovic asked the council to add the $10,000,000 in extra state aid on top of the mayor’s number and to continue pursuing another $14,000,000 the speakers said would be needed to avoid further cuts. The speakers urged the council to use the funding to shore up staffing and special-education costs they said had been cut over years of underfunding.
What’s next: the council will consider the capital and operating budgets in the coming votes. Commenters urged an explicit allocation of the one-time state aid into the schools’ budget; the transcript does not record a council vote on using the $10,000,000 for schools during this session.
