ED Committee Hearing Transcript for 03/04/2005

SENATOR GAFFEY: Under the rules, we call agency heads, Mayors or First Selectmen or Legislators. At eight minutes to 2:00, we're going to the second list, which is the public.

The rules expressly prohibit any type of alternating between the public and the people on the first list during the public portion of the hearing, which begins at eight minutes to 2:00.

The rules expressly prohibit that. So if you're a Legislator or an agency head or a Mayor or First Selectman and you want to testify, the rules state that you wait until the end of the public portion, and then you can testify.

Just so everybody understands, we have a very lengthy list today, very lengthy list on the first hour's list, which the Chair is going to limit to people who are non-Legislators because people who are Legislators are in this building, can talk to us at any time, any place.

We want to hear from the agency heads, First Selectmen, and Mayors, and the Commissioner who are over here today. There's no way we could get through the first hour with everybody on this list.

With that in mind, understanding the rules, we're going to have a three-minute time limit on people today, so we can get through everybody.

If you hear the bell sound, if you could just summarize your comments and wrap it up, we'd appreciate it. With that I'd like to call the Mayor of the City of Bridgeport, Mayor Fabrizi.

MAYOR FABRIZI: Good afternoon, Senator. Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann, Senator Fonfara, and Representative Reinoso, Ranking Members and Members of the Education Committee, I did see Representative Fitch and Representative Clemons.

Thanks for the opportunity to present testimony to you today. I know you're on a tight timeline, and I'll try to be as brief as possible.

I want to thank the Committee for its leadership and continued support. We know you have a great, challenging task in front of you regarding educational funding for the State of Connecticut and all its municipalities, your continued support for educational funding for our most distressed cities and taking on the task for trying to restructure or analyze the ECS formulas and special education formulas as well.

It's been stated many, many times throughout the municipalities and up here in the statehouse, that the over reliance on the property tax system as a source of municipal revenue is a major impediment to obtaining educational excellence and equity.

Local public education is the largest and most expensive government service provided in most municipalities in Connecticut. More than one-third of all local and state tax revenue is spent on primary and secondary education.

Communities pay disproportionately high property taxes with ever-rising mill rates needed to keep pace with escalating education costs, which are quite excessive at times.

Many communities face a mill rate, which approaches 30, 40, and even 50 mills. The simple fact is many Connecticut school districts lack sufficient resources to provide a quality education to all their students.

Bridgeport is in that category. In the City of Bridgeport, we serve a growing number of students who are poor, minority, limited English, handicapped or at risk of academic failure.

Bridgeport has more students than any other city or town in the entire State of Connecticut, in excess of 24,000.

We speak 67 different languages in our schools, yet we double the number of languages spoken in Hartford and New Haven.

More than one out of three students have no preschool experience at all when entering our schools in the City of Bridgeport.

Poor students, needy students, disadvantaged students, impoverished students need extra help, extra weight, extra resources, and a smaller class size.

The list goes on. Of course, each of those comes with an expense. Fiscally distressed municipalities are unable to meet or sustain the legitimate financial needs of their schools amidst the changing demographics, and also the rising educational standards the state and federal mandates given to us as well.

There are five elements I recently laid out in the City of Bridgeport that are the top five priorities of my administration.

Those are a strong school system, high ethical standards, a healthy housing market, a city that is safe and clean.

The fifth element, when you bring all of those together is economic development. I can tell you this. I'm extremely proud to be Bridgeport's first Mayor who is also a teacher and school administrator by trade.

I spent 25 years in the Bridgeport public schools, and I can tell you that on a first-hand basis I truly understand the difficulties in an urban environment.

I understand the funding challenges. I understand the disciplinary issues and the scarce resources, also the dilapidated infrastructure.

We in Bridgeport have committed to build four new schools in the next three years. In addition to the local money that we'll provide for education in public schools, there's the additional indebtedness that we incur to pay off our boss--

SEN. GAFFEY: Mayor, if you could just summarize, I'd appreciate it.

MAYOR FABRIZI: --in summary, Senator, I need to bring up the point of the inequity that I feel that Bridgeport students have been shortchanged for quite some time. They've been shortchanged in my estimate about $125 million in educational funding since the cap was implemented.

A closer look at funding reveals that all those student enrollment figures have been kept up. We've exceeded Hartford and New Haven.

It's not the intention of the City of Bridgeport to take money away from other municipalities, but to make it more equitable for Bridgeport students.

I strongly recommend and I believe you are there that the ECS formula needs to be analyzed, addressed, and fully funded.

A new approach to funding schools adequately and equitably through substantially greater state investment is both urgent and essential to ensuring Connecticut's economic future and tradition of excellence.

I've submitted written testimony that has many more points in there. I appreciate the time of the Committee.

I wish I had a little more, but I understand that you have an extremely busy schedule today.

Thanks so much, Senator Gaffey, and Representative Fleischmann, Ranking Members of the Committee, and other Committee Members. You'll hear from me again shortly on the issue as well.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate you taking the time to come up today and later on to testify. Senator Finch?

SEN. FINCH: Mr. Mayor, what impact does property tax have on the home values in Bridgeport? I recently read in the Connecticut Post, a home being sold in the Black Rock section for about $750,000.

Its property taxes were almost $30,000 a year, and underneath it, it said the schools your children would go to were Basset High School and Longfellow School.

It sort of summed up the problem you seem to be facing with property taxes and education both driving down the value of your grant list.

MAYOR FABRIZI: You're absolutely correct. One thing that we have found is new folks moving in to neighborhoods, especially affluent neighborhoods where they could afford the prices that they send their children to non-public schools with an additional cost.

That has a tremendous impact on what the value of the home is and also the local school district as well.

SEN. FINCH: If you could just give us two choices or three choices you're facing this year. You're putting a budget together. You want to spend more on schools.

I think you've spent more on schools last year. You've increased the amount of schools. How do you get that money? What are your choices in putting together the budget?

MAYOR FABRIZI: The only choice we have is to raise the local property taxes to fund our budget.

The other choices that we have are to cut our workforce, and I can tell you quite frankly, and I've said it before, in the City of Bridgeport, it's very contentious regarding high property taxes.

When you look in your budget and you're already running a skeletal, a barebones budget, it makes it extremely difficult to cut. There are going to be some bold and difficult decisions.

Even though we cut, and if we have to cut in public safety we will, not that that's the smartest or the best thing to do.

We still won't make what I believe is a sufficient budget to maintain where the taxes are today, as far as the mill rate's concerned.

SEN. FINCH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Senator Finch. Representative Reinoso.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, Mayor Fabrizi, Superintendent Tolbert, Representative Martinez.

In a previous presentation, there was a statement in which it said that Bridgeport is losing over $1,000, is over $1,000 lower per student.

In my calculation, since we have about 23,000 students in Bridgeport probably, we can say that it's $22 million to $23 million a year that we're losing. Is that correct?

MAYOR FABRIZI: So, $22 million of what, Representative?

REP. REINOSO: That Bridgeport is not receiving. Is that correct?

MAYOR FABRIZI: That's correct when you take that and you place it against the City of Hartford.

The City of Hartford, which has not been capped, does receive almost $24 million more than the City of Bridgeport in funding for its public schools.

REP. REINOSO: Mayor, in the last four or five years, if it's $23 million, we have a lot of money that Bridgeport is not receiving, right?

MAYOR FABRIZI: That's correct. I've estimated it at closer to $125 million collectively.

REP. REINOSO: Could you tell me, now that you have the Superintendent of the schools next to you, could you tell, me there are always consequences for this because of the lack of funding.

Could you tell me what are the consequences, and what's happening in Bridgeport because of the lack of funding?

MAYOR FABRIZI: I'm going to move to Superintendent Tolbert with that. The first thing that comes to my mind, as a former teacher in the City of Bridgeport, is class size.

SUPERINTENDENT TOLBERT: Thank you, Representative Reinoso. The impact of inadequate funding has a definite impact on the performance of students.

First of all, our classes are filled to capacity. By union contract, we have to cap classes at 30. Most of our classes are at 30.

The second one is the inability to recruit and retain qualified teachers. We are unable to provide the salary to retain teachers.

We are living in a very competitive area in that particular area.

The other is that we are not able to provide the support services that our students need in order to perform effectively in school.

We only have around 34, 36 social workers. In a district of this size, and with the problems that we are encountering with each of our students in the community, we need at least 100 or better social workers.

When we look at the ratio of social workers, also guidance counselors, psychologies that we don't have, over the last four years, we have had to cut at least 13 administrators from the district office.

These are primarily curriculum specialists, the people that we need in order to enhance the classroom performance of our teachers. We also have undesirable working conditions for our teachers.

Even if we can't pay them what we should, at least we could provide them with adequate facilities in order for them to perform.

We're looking in terms of, only one-third of our students have access to preschool programs or pre-K programs.

When we're dealing with a population of underprivileged children, we know that it is to our advantage to get children at a very early age.

If we don't get them at a very early age, the likelihood of their succeeding in school is almost none. Thank you.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you. Mayor Fabrizi, my last question. In terms of school construction, could you tell us where you are?

MAYOR FABRIZI: I can tell you that the last school that was built in the City of Bridgeport was about 13 years ago.

The oldest-standing structure in the City of Bridgeport out of 40 buildings is a school that I believe is going to be 126 years old. Our infrastructure is not in good shape at all.

It's time we do something about it. We have already committed to build four new schools in the next three years.

With thanks again to the Connecticut General Assembly on a $35 million grant, we will actually make a fifth school become a reality several years down the road.

We were given the $35 million of swing space while we're building the other schools. We're committed. We have plans. We're in design.

We're already doing relocation, which is a whole other issue. We're building four new schools in the next three years. And very shortly thereafter, there will be a fifth online because of the grant the Connecticut General Assembly afforded us last year.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you very much.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate it.

MAYOR FABRIZI: Senator, thank you very much. I just want to state that Paul Timpanelli from the Business Council will be speaking with you as well today with the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition, Tammy Papa, and so forth.

SEN. GAFFEY: If you could just hold on a second, there's a Member that would like to address a question. Representative?

REP. CLEMONS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Representative Martinez, and Superintendent Tolbert for your testimony.

In reference to the Superintendent, your testimony with all the categories that you've mentioned in terms of school needs.

If it was theoretically possible, in terms of the next school funding year, how much money do you think it would take to get you or get the school system with all those issues, concerns, and to get you to that point?

How much money would it take for the Legislature to get you there? The second question, could it be somewhat of a phase-in in terms of those dollars?

SUPERINTENDENT TOLBERT: I think we need the dollars now. To answer your question, how much, we're looking at a budget for next year and just holding everything at the same level, not adding any positions or any new programs.

We're looking at a 5% or 6% increase in our current budget. We're talking about $10 million, and I know the Mayor doesn't want to hear that at this point.

To get the kinds of support systems that we need in place, we've estimated around $22 million will somewhat provide us with some degree of adequacy, not including the reduction in class sizes.

That comes with the building project. I would estimate around $22 million to $23 million.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much. Secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, Bob Genuario. Mr. Secretary, it's a pleasure to see you in your new role for the first time before this Committee.

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: Senator Gaffey, the pleasure is mine. With me is Kathy Gay who is the Section Director for the Office of Policy and Management with regard to education issues.

Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann when he returns, distinguished Members of the Committee. It's a pleasure to be here.

You have some weighty issues that are coming before you this session no doubt. Some of those issues are raised by the Governor's bill, House Bill 6680, and I'm here to testify on that bill today.

I appreciate the Committee's indulgence. You have my written testimony. And in consideration of the Chairman's opening remarks, I'm going to try and limit my direct testimony and get to questions, which I think you might all be interested in.

I'm just going to highlight not all of the provisions of the bill, but I think some of the more critical provisions of the bill that, no doubt, you will spend a fair amount of time deliberating on.

Sections One through Seven of the bill essentially set forth the Governor's new early childhood education initiative. It does a couple of things.

It provides a certain amount of funding, $5.5 million per year from operational costs for a new type of program.

One of the concerns of the current early childhood education funding is that it is limited to a finite number of towns.

While those towns that access funds under the current early childhood education program would be eligible to access funds under this program, other towns statewide would be able to access funds.

We believe that there are children in rural areas, impoverished areas that are currently not able to access state assistance for early childhood education programs that could benefit from such a program and such an opportunity.

The data is clear, as this Committee is probably more aware of than anyone, that financing early childhood education is a cost-effective way of providing long-term solutions for kids and for municipalities who ultimately have to educate those kids.

Additionally, the Governor's proposal includes some capital money for the creation of new slots.

It includes some operating debt service money, which will allow new programs to access Sheff funds. The state will pay the debt service on those Sheff funds out of the state's operating fund money.

We anticipate that the debt service component would allow the creation of up to 1,000 slots, the physical creation of 1,000 slots.

The funds that are allocated in the operating budget would provide adequate funds to support those slots.

It was important to us that we not ignore our existing early childhood education programs as well.

You will see in the bill that we have proposed increasing the per-slot grant. One of the things that we have heard over the years is that those programs are under some financial distress.

One of the problems with those programs is they experience a high turnover of teachers because of the inability to pay their early childhood education teachers an adequate salary.

We proposed increases in the per-student allocation for that. Additionally, another area of concern of the existing early childhood education programs is the ability for preschool teachers, many of which are simply high school graduates, to obtain additional funding.

The Governor's proposed a scholarship program to provide basically the ability to attain an associate's degree or other comparable training for those current early childhood education teachers.

It kind of goes hand-in-hand. You provide the money, so that they can get the associate's degree.

You increase the slot funding, so that when they get the associate's degree, the early childhood education program can pay them an increase amount.

The second major area of the bill deals with the state's efforts to address its obligations under the Sheff v. O'Neill case.

It takes on a couple of component areas. One of the areas is takes on is the issue of proper funding for magnet schools and for the Open Choice Program.

Currently, RESC-operated magnet schools receive a per-pupil state subsidy based on a sliding scale. The maximum amount is $5,302.

It is always anticipated that the sending districts will also share a component of the cost because that sending district no longer has to educate that child.

The problem that we've had is that the average cost of educating a child in a RESC-operated magnet school is about $9,800 a year.

The numbers simply haven't been adding up. What we have proposed is an increase in per-slot funding from up to $6,200 the first year, and up to $6,500 the second year, a substantial increase in what they're provided now.

Then there's an obligation on the part of the sending district to make up the difference, so that the schools will be adequately funded.

The schools will be adequately funded in a manner that appropriately spreads the cost between state and municipality, who currently have the obligation for the financial subsidies for these programs.

I was trying to be brief. Similarly, we've increased funding the Open Choice Program because we're not meeting our obligations.

We've proposed a substantial increase in special education funding and have asked this Committee and the Legislature to create a taskforce on educational finance and accountability.

Primarily, this is to bring some coordination into the different ways that we fund public schools and alternative public schools.

They right now do not seem to be very well connected. I'll stop there, and I'll be happy to entertain any questions.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Secretary. Let me first invite you back because there's a report that was required to be issued to this Committee of the costs of No Child Left Behind, the state costs, and the local costs.

Unfortunately, the report was issued not to this Committee, and I know there are Members of this Committee including the Chairman who aren't pleased about that.

We're going to be looking forward to you coming back with the Commissioner to present the total report, state costs, local costs, so that we have a full understanding of what we're faced with No Child Left Behind as we look to the out years.

We'll schedule that and set that up to accommodate your schedule.

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: I would be delighted to engage in that discussion with you, Mr. Chairman.

SEN. GAFFEY: Let me recognize Chairman Fleischmann, who would like to ask you a couple of questions.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: First of all, thank you for your testimony. Recognizing our time constraints, I'm going to try and be brief. And if you can too, that would be great.

The Governor's early childhood education proposal, I'm pleased that she's placed emphasis on it.

I'm still a bit amused as to why there isn't more of an effort to dovetail with school readiness, which this Legislature really pushed hard on. I'm sure you were a part of that, about six years ago initially.

Also, state-funded daycare centers, which we built, which are beautiful facilities, some of which are facing very financially tough times. Why aren't we, in your proposal, doing more to mesh early childhood education with those existing initiatives?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: First, I want to point out that I think our existing school readiness program is funded about $49 million a year and we are committed to continuing that program.

The point of this program is to really create a partnership between the states.

It's a new approach to create a partnership between the state and municipalities, perhaps some nonprofits, which exist within municipalities, so that we can leverage state dollars and maximize the use of those state dollars for the purpose of providing the maximum amount of early childhood education.

That really isn't possible under the existing program. The second reason that we have gone off on this route is that we did want, recognizing the need for additional early childhood education funding within our urban areas, we also recognize that that need exists in some impoverished areas that exist outside of our rural areas.

We wanted to extend the opportunity to those children as well. Certainly, the DSS childcare program is an expansive program.

We're well aware of some of the issues that they are confronting. We did our best within the resources that we reasonably thought were available to us to put our dollars where we thought we could leverage the best.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Well, thank you. I have to say leverage is part of the reason I asked the question. Do you think we'll have lower marginal costs and greater results to the extent we're able to build on existing programs?

I'll be talking to you further as to ways we can do that. With regard to your proposal on ECS, I think you were too busy to witness the presentation we had earlier this morning in financing constitutional law.

One of the points that was made is by simply putting a COLA on top of what each city or town received last year, you are exacerbating inequities that may have existed.

For example, if a town was getting 120% of what it deserved under the formula, in some cities it's going up 2.4%.

If a town was getting 60% of what it deserved under the formula it's going up 1.2% in relative terms.

Given that fact, don't you think it makes sense for the General Assembly to rethink such an approach and rather to respect the formula, which drives dollars to communities based on need?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: I think that our thinking on this is perhaps best reflected in what we have asked the Legislature to do for the second year of its bi-annum budget.

Candidly, we don't believe that folks have ever looked at the ECS funding formula in coordination with the funding of magnet schools, with the funding of charter schools, with the funding of other educational public facilities.

As those institutions grow, and they are growing we, now have 10 to 11 magnet schools in Hartford, similar amounts in New Haven, only three in Bridgeport, interestingly enough.

It might be a way for Bridgeport to quickly access some state funds. We believe that we need to look at all of these together.

If we're going to continue to go down this road we can't look at the funding formulas independently. We haven't asked for a five-year study.

We've asked for a quick analysis. We want to participate in this analysis and come back in the interim with hopefully something that addresses the issues you are concerned about.

In the interim, we felt because we are not absolutely confident in the direction that study will lead us, the fairest thing to do would be to provide 2%.

Basically it's a cost of living increase. I think that's the way you characterized it. I think that's an accurate characterization.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: I thank you for that response. I do have other questions, which I am not going to pose today out of deference to all the other folks who are waiting, and I hope that's an approach that Committee Members will also follow. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Mr. Secretary, I agree with you that the whole funding system has never been looked at in regard to the other systems that you mentioned, the charters, the magnets.

Let's consider priority school district grants. Let's consider categorical grants. Put them all in the mix.

Even after we do that, I do believe that the Program Review Committee and their staff did an excellent job at reviewing the ECS formula.

Whether it's Program Review or the gentleman we had here for the morning session, in unison, they said the most glaring inequity is the fact that you have capped this formula.

You know exactly what that means, in your background as Appropriations Chairman and serving on this Committee.

I believe OFA has pegged it at about $76 million to uncap the formula, and current law requires us to uncap the formula. Yet, it just went completely unaddressed in the Governor's budget.

I understand the dollars that are involved here, but maybe we can agree, hopefully, at the end of the day, hopefully, there is an end of the day on June 3^rd or 5^th or whenever it is, that we can get to an earnest phase-out of the cap.

I'd like to see the $76 million appropriated immediately because I have capped towns. But the most vulnerable point we have in a court of law right now according to the lead lawyer, Attorney Horton in the Horton v. Meskill case, is the fact that we say we acknowledge the fact that we have this glaring inequity in the cap.

Then we say we're going to lift the cap. Then we don't fund it. I think policy-wise, and I like your thoughts on this, we ought to move to removing that cap as earnestly and as quickly as we can so that we don't as a state set ourselves up for a court telling us to do so.

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: First of all, I certainly think that policy is created better with the executive and legislative groups working together than the alternate route of a hand-down from the judicial branch of government, which doesn't have the expertise in that area.

Having said that, I believe that that is an approach that ought to be looked at during the interim.

We ought to address that. During this first year of the bi-annum, my concern would be that we move in a direction committing ourselves to a particular direction prior to the taskforce rendering its conclusions.

I don't think anybody has ever looked at the coordination of these different grants. In some of our biggest ECS, I won't call them winners or losers because that's a charged term, but in some of the towns that get the most ECS money, they're also tapping into the most magnet school money.

We also don't look at how we fund magnet schools with charter schools. You have magnet schools operating in beautifully constructed buildings and charter schools operating in Class B renovated office space.

Sometimes charter schools are doing better than the magnet schools, not always, sometimes. We have to look at all of that. I would point out that for immediate relief statewide in the first year of this bi-annum, leaving the second year aside for the work of the taskforce, there is an overall 5% to 6% increase in educational funding.

One of the areas that this Committee has been very outspoken about, and rightfully so, is in the area of special education.

We have provided a 38% increase in absolute funding in special education grants. We're trying to get there. We think we need to get there in a methodological fashion.

SEN. GAFFEY: Whatever the method, and when it takes place, whatever taskforce is set up, if a taskforce is set up, the cap doesn't go away.

The cap still remains there. My big concern is that we as the state, the State of Connecticut's government has set itself up to be the subject of yet another court case on education funding.

We handed them the best argument they've ever had walking into court, saying they acknowledge the most arbitrary and capricious part of this formula and that it's capped.

They said they were going to remove it, yet they didn't fund it. I have a big concern that we're headed in that direction. We're going to be not the better for it.

I would argue that we need to get to that cap immediately, so that we get to protect our interests in the advent of a litigation in the near future trying to defend ourselves.

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: Be happy to work with you on that, Senator.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Sir. Representative Labriola.

REP. LABRIOLA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Secretary for your testimony.

Thank you for the massive amounts of work that you and your staff have put into drafting the Governor's proposals on education.

I just want to ask a couple of questions, first about the proposal that's near and dear to me. I believe in it very strongly.

I made such a proposal last session as well with regard to the laptop computers for English students in certain select communities. Could you comment on that proposal?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: I'm proud to say, and I know the Commissioner's going to testify later, that that proposal came from the educators.

That proposal came from the Department of Education, the Commissioner, and the people that she works with because they felt it was an efficient and appropriate way to be utilized to teach kids how to write.

That's one of the areas of deficiencies that we see in our public schools. It's not just to teach technology. It's because it's an appropriate tool to get back to basics with the 21^st Century technology.

By utilizing the appropriate hardware and software, children can get immediate feedback on whether their sentence structure is correct, on whether their paragraph structure is correct.

We also put in funds for the schools to relate to training and the like and a variety of other things. The credit for that proposal goes to the educators.

We're just happy that we could provide the funding to support it.

REP. LABRIOLA: Mr. Secretary, I do agree with the Chairman of this Committee that it would have been appropriate for a report on the cost to the State of Connecticut for implementation of No Child Left Behind to come directly to this Committee, so I do look forward to that down the road.

With that being said, would you please comment on whether or not you think that that figure of some $41.6 million is inflated?

Do you think it's actual, whether some of those monies that are included in that estimate are fixed costs or already built in?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: First, let me offer a disclaimer. We have not had a complete opportunity to review all of it, and we need to take a little time before I give you an accurate answer on that.

It's an important question. I would, however, make the following observations. One is that the amount of funds is the amount of funds over a period of years.

Two, no doubt some of the cost can be done by virtue of dispatching current personnel to perform the tasks required.

It may not be as difficult to deal with at first blush, but I don't want to belittle the problems it may cause. We're going to have to deal with it.

It no doubt will require some additional funding. We were hopeful that we'd be able to get a waiver, which as you know, it was recently reported that we were not able to get that waiver.

We're going to have to look at that in total, and we're going to have to come back to this Committee and no doubt the Appropriations Committee to deal with that.

It is money over a course of years, some of which basically can be in kind funds that we can do by programming current personnel.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Representative. Representative Reinoso.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, Secretary. I applaud the efforts of the Governor and your office in terms of early childhood education.

I think every kid in the State of Connecticut, from whatever city or town, deserves the opportunity at a very early age.

Saying that, in terms of education we have a segment of young kids that aren't being educated.

I'd like to hear your comments why in the proposal it has not included charter schools? Could you tell me why?

BOB GENAUARIO: It's a good question. We are very impressed with what charter schools have done.

There are 12 charter schools currently operating in the State of Connecticut. We've looked at performance measures and some are doing remarkably well, some not so well.

They have to overcome significant obstacles and I think they're making a great case this year.

With the dollars we had available to us this year we felt we needed to place them in the areas that we did place them.

We felt that a more crying need was the area of special education, early childhood education and also our obligations to comply with the Sheff v. O'Neill stipulated agreements.

We did what everybody else does, what the Legislature will do when it balances priorities. We made choices.

I would also say that they are expressly, charter schools are expressly included in the legislation that requests a review of our funding formulas.

I think they could well provide a significant answer to some of our vexing problems that we face in the future.

The funding formula that they operate under is certainly among the least generous of the funding formulas that we see statewide. We think that needs to be looked at.

REP. REINOSO: Last question, Mr. Chairman. I'm going to ask you the same question that I asked Secretary Rine.

Are you aware that the City of Bridgeport is under funded per pupil for over five years?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: I am aware that the City of Bridgeport gets significantly less money because of the operation of the cap on the ECS formula. I am aware of that.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Representative Fritz.

REP. FRITZ: Good afternoon, Secretary, and thank you very much for coming today. First of all, I would like to begin by associating myself with the remarks of Chairman Fleischmann regarding the early childhood education component.

I'm not sure that, I'm thinking you're trying to reinvent the wheel when we know that there are many, many early childhood education facilities that as he said are hurting.

Maybe we need to look at what we can do to stabilize them and put everybody on the same track.

The second concern I have in this bill deals with the Open Choice Program. The two towns I represent take 50% of the children from New Haven in the Choice Program.

I'm concerned because the language in line 168 says within available appropriations. Now the Choice Program is an existing program that we know works very well.

The rest of the bill that has new programs does not have that qualifying language, so from my point of view I believe that language needs to be removed.

I know how that language works. When we run out of money then we don't fund.

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: Let me address both issues. First, on the early childhood education component.

While I spent more time talking about the Governor's new initiative for the partnerships that are to be created, we had listened very carefully to what the existing school readiness programs were looking for.

They were looking for a higher per-slot funding and they were looking for education money for their teachers. They were looking for some capital funds.

Sometimes you have a school that just needs money for a new boiler. We put all of that in our budget to try and stabilize and bolster the existing school readiness programs, understanding that's different from the DSS childcare programs, which Representative Fleischmann started talking about.

I understand and recognize that, but to the extent we have existing school readiness programs we did exactly what the experts in the field and the people who run those asked us to do.

That's number one. Number two, on the Open Choice Program, this is certainly not the only program that includes a within appropriations component.

Many, many programs do in a variety of fields, education and other. The Governor's proposal, the Governor's budget that goes along with this bill does include an adequate amount to fund the existing Open Choice programs and to increase Open Choice enrollment [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 1A to Tape 1B.]

--the bill would adopt the funding as well for the Open Choice Program. We're trying to get more children into the Open Choice Program, which is the reason for the increased slot funding and the increased transportation funding.

As you can appreciate, the Executive Branch cannot be in a position where it has a law that says give x amount per slot unless the legislative branch appropriates that amount, or we'll be back for a deficiency.

REP. FRITZ: But you say in the sections of the bill that deals with the per-slot allotment, for the early on childhood where you stipulate it $6,925.

You stipulate it when it comes to magnet schools with increasing the two years, so why don't we stipulate it in the same language for the Open Choice Program?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: One of the reasons is that if we were to run out of money in the early childhood education programs we simply wouldn't add slots.

The Open Choice Program, once we get a district in we don't want to discourage that district from bringing in more children.

The bottom line is that if you look at our proposals collectively, the legislative proposal and the budget proposal, there is more than a sufficient amount of funding in those proposals.

That's our priority. There's more than a sufficient amount of funding in those proposals to meet those needs.

I would be troubled if there was the adoption of a requirement of a certain amount of dollars per slot but not an appropriation of an adequate amount of dollars to cover that slot. That's the best I can answer.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Representative Kutel.

REP. KUTEL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I want to thank you for recognizing that poor, rural towns have the same socio-economic issues as urban towns.

I want to encourage you to think that way, because I know in the Department of Education's proposal on preschool, I believe it was for universal preschool for all urban areas.

Rural towns such as what I represent would not be able to access that program. It's important that you know that we, the bottom 25% of the towns, many of them are poor rural towns that have the same economic factors as the urban areas.

I wish that the Department recognizes that. We need to have access to those programs. We have been shut out of those programs, so I want to thank you for that.

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: In fairness to the Department, they participated in the development of this idea because I think they do recognize that. It's an important thing to recognize.

Thank you for commenting on it, we'll be looking for your help.

REP. KUTEL: You'll get it. The other thing is I think I heard you say that on the laptop computer issue, as you know there's concern that we should have used those funds for early childhood education.

Is it, in defense of the laptop computers, is that the way to make school more real? What are we trying to do here?

A lot of these kids do have laptops you would think, at this day and age in the school system.

What are we trying to do here that justifies expenditure versus putting it into preschool?

SECT. BOB GENUARIO: The laptop computer program involves more than just the hardware. It involves the software too.

One of the reasons the Department recommended this program is because of the facility with which this technology can be used to teach writing.

You'll note specifically they're designated for English classes, writing, punctuation, the types of things that many of our students have not developed skills in as quickly as we can.

No doubt the Commissioner can speak with more versatility than I on the educational components of it, but it was that concept I believe that persuaded the Governor that this was an important component.

While early childhood education is a significant priority for the Governor, ninth and tenth graders need help too.

This is a way as you said to make education real to them, to give them technology that they're familiar with and they're comfortable with, many of them are.

Give it to them in a way and with software that supports, so that they can become familiar not only with the technology but with the rote skills of reading and writing that they are not as familiar with as they should be. We think it will be a great success.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary, we look forward to see you again. Is Mayor Slifka here? Mayor.

MAYOR SLIFKA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Fleischmann, Chairman Gaffey, fellow Members of the Committee, my name's Scott Slifka and I am the Mayor of the Town of West Hartford.

I am here today to urge you not to follow the Governor's lead in balancing the state budget on the backs of its municipalities.

Specifically, I'm here to urge you to finally fulfill this body's commitment to fully fund ECS grants to our cities and towns.

With me, who will also illustrate this who is from our Board of Education is Terry Schmitt.

I will try to summarize my written remarks, Mr. Chairman. West Hartford, first let me give you the West Hartford perspective. West Hartford has been a town of unwavering financial support for education.

We have an increasingly growing and diverse student population, and we cannot continue to adequately fund public education unless this Legislature reviews and reforms its relationship with municipalities concerning the funding of public education.

In other words we're short significant dollars right now for our schools, and they way we pay for it doesn't work anymore.

Let me give you briefly the numbers as respects my community. Right now we are funded at 64% of our ECS grant.

For this coming year that's approximately a $6 million shortfall. Our cumulative shortfall over the last seven or eight fiscal years is approximately $40 million.

This is not the first time I have been to this Legislature or to this Committee to make this same pitch.

It's beginning to feel like an annually futile exercise. Let me leave you with a couple of points since I recognize the severe bunch of difficulties you all find yourselves in.

I do not expect full funding to come anytime soon. I want to point out that West Hartford is far from alone in making this plea.

Many similar communities, known particularly for their professional management, two that come to mind very quickly are Hamden and Manchester must address similar challenges with a similar lack of support from the state.

The state is excellent at discovering funding to vote to crises, real or perceived, but this is often done at the expense of well-run communities of all sizes and demographics whose needs are not as obvious.

To the extent that this funding shortfall is the result of any misperceptions about the wealth level of mine or similar communities, let me correct them. We may be well-run, we may not be distressed, but we are not wealthy and we cannot continue to do this on our own.

Second and more importantly is for all of us. This state must stop the zero-sum game, which is perpetuated by the present ECS funding scheme.

This unnecessarily pits communities of all types against each other in a war for scarce dollars, and that's a real shame. We all have very important needs.

They should all be focused on very seriously. We should not be up here trying to compare one need to another in effort for the same pot of money.

We have to find a different way to do this. On a personal note I have to say that adds a lot of difficulty to regional cooperative efforts that we have in all of the capitol region and other urban centers.

I'm going to turn this over right now to Mr. Schmitt, but I want to thank you for hearing me today and for your help now to close the immediate funding gap.

Thank you for your attention, I would be happy to take your questions should you have them.

TERRY SCHMITT: Representative Fleischmann, Senator Gaffey, thank you very much for this time.

I'm here to speak to you in support of the bills that are not before your Committee that have to do with educational cost sharing and to frankly praise you for the work you're doing in addressing this very serious issue.

You're trying to do the right thing from what I can tell and we appreciate it. Let me explain why I think the right thing is crucial for the town in which I serve and in other towns like Manchester and Hamden in similar situations.

West Hartford is an impressively diverse community, more than many may realize. The nearly 10,000 students in our school system, about 1,600 of them come from homes where English is not the primary language.

In fact, there are more than 63 different languages spoken in those homes. I looked at the list, there are some languages on there I've never heard of in my life.

More than 13% of our students receive free or reduced-price lunches. We have over 1,200 special education students.

Thirty percent of our students are minorities. In short, we are not a homogenous community.

We are not all wealthy or even economically stable. We have many at-risk students, and we are hurt by an educational cost-sharing cap that gives us year after year less money than other districts with far fewer challenges than we face.

The ECS cap hurts everyone, but it disproportionately affects the most vulnerable of our children in ways you cannot always see.

What it tends to mean is that we cannot start up new programs to meet new needs. Many of our needs are new because our school district has grown by nearly 1,500 students over the last decade.

Here is what we can't do right now because we don't have the money. As both the Governor and the General Assembly have been trying to do we would like to start up town-wide early childhood education centers with sliding scale tuitions.

It's one of the best ways to address the achievement gap. We don't have any money to start anything new.

SEN. GAFFEY: Terry, I'm sorry to cut you off, I'm trying to give you a little bit of latitude here.

Representative Heagney has a question and we're bumping up against the public portion of the meeting, so I want to give Representative Heagney and Representative Fleischmann the opportunity to ask their questions, so we can get that wrapped up and move on.

REP. HANGNEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My question is for Mayor Slifka. I was reviewing your testimony and saw that you had mentioned my community in there, which is Simsbury and indicated that we were receiving 100% of our ECS grant.

It just shows you how numbers can be confusing in this area. While you are not receiving yours and losing about $445 per student my community has a $510 shortage per student.

I agree with you in principle that this kind of cap, which holds back money that appropriately should be going to communities while other communities, and the list we have shows some communities receiving $5,000 over their cap.

It's clearly an unconscionable situation. I stood on the floor in the House last year when we passed this budget and said it was unconscionable, and I'll do so again this year if we end up with the same result. Thank you.

MAYOR SLIFKA: Thank you, Representative. If I had more time I would have elaborated on that but this is just to point out the confusion.

You and I end up having a discussion about this and it's primarily that we both have our needs and I hope they can be adequately met.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: My question is brief and simply a clarification. Terry, your testimony mentioned that you appreciate the Committee's work.

Would I be right in interpreting the testimony from the two of you that you're supportive of the two Committee bills that would lift the cap and raise the foundation but less so of the gubernatorial proposal that doesn't take that approach?

MAYOR SLIFKA: Yeah. I'm specifically looking at House Bill 6822 and Senate Bill 1213, those bills, I'm very supportive of those.

TERRY SCHMITT: I would be too.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. We appreciate the time you put into your testimony. Thank you both.

Let me just announce that we do have an overflow room in 1A which is the hearing room over year, it's got audio and visuals and is more comfortable.

If you'd be more comfortable in that room it's available to you. Secondly, for the Legislators and other officials on this first hour list, if you cannot stay until the end of the public portion, what we're going to do is have another hearing to give you the opportunity to come back and testify.

I'm bound to work within the rules of the General Assembly, so at this point in time we're going to move to the public portion of the hearing. First person on the list is Michelle Cunningham.

MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM: Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann and Members of the Committee, my name is Michelle Ducette Cunningham and I am here today testifying in support of Raised House Bill 6802, AN ACT CONCERNING A CONNECTICUT OUT OF SCHOOL TIME GRANT.

I'm speaking on behalf of the Connecticut After School Network, a statewide organization that works to ensure that children and youth have safe, supervised enrichment activities available during their out of school hours.

The Network is overseen by the Connecticut After School Advisory Council, which was established by legislation two years ago.

The State Department of Education convenes this Council, and through their work received a three-year grant from the Mott Foundation to support the creation of the Connecticut After School Network, which I am here representing today.

We are a large, diverse group of city officials, school districts, state agencies, businesses, private and nonprofit providers, parents, faith-based organizations and community-based organizations.

Many after school advocates are here today to testify in support of additional state investment in after school as you can see by our yellow stickers.

I'd like to ask all of you who are here today who may not get a chance to testify because of the timing to please stand up because not everybody can see that we have our after school, it looks like a road sign, our big yellow sticker.

Many of us aren't able to be here also, because as you'll notice it's almost time for school to be let out so many people are actually with the kids.

They would like to be here, but could not. This grant program is very important, and it would accomplish three goals.

It would build on an already successful pilot project in Plainville, Montville and Thompson that provided support for strategic planning for after school needs.

Secondly, it would improve the quality of existing programs by providing additional resources for staff training and technical assistance.

Third, it would allow 3,500 young people to participate in after school programs. That's about 50 kids in each of 70 programs.

These grants would be available to any nonprofit organization such as youth service bureaus, family resource centers, boys and girls clubs and also to schools or municipalities to apply for these grants.

While all of this would of course not meet all the unmet needs for after school programs, it would go a long way in creating opportunities that did not exist previously.

The current lack of after school activities means that more than 50,000 Connecticut children ages 6 to 12 go home to an empty house after school, often taking their younger siblings with them to care for on an average of seven hours per week.

That's a lot of time to get into a lot of trouble. After school programs can provide safe alternatives for those children. At best, school occupies one quarter of children's waking hours.

After school programs keep children safe, help working families and improve academic achievement.

Research shows children in self-care experience more accidents and injuries, more behavior problems, lower social competence, lower grades, lower achievement on test scores.

Likewise, self-care in adolescence has been linked to increased likelihood in cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, teen pregnancy and drug use.

Unsupervised time is prime time for trouble. Nine out of ten police chiefs interviewed indicate that juvenile crime and victimization decreases when opportunities exist for kids in supervised after school programs.

In summary, after school programs are a great investment. There's significant research that shows that participation helps kids and helps communities.

I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of this much-needed grant program.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much. Chairman Fleischmann.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Just very briefly I'd like to thank you very much for the advocacy you and the others have shown here today on behalf of this cause.

I wanted to check in with regard to the language that's here before us. We had talked yesterday a bit about the language.

I think as currently drafted it covers virtually all the entities whom you want to see covered.

Have you had a chance to talk to folks and come to an understanding on that, or do you still think there are modifications to the specific language that need to be made?

MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM: I think the language that I presented to you yesterday has a number of technical improvements, but the specific groups are covered in the language as it was written.

I think in creating RFP the State Department of Education might be more specific in detailing the types of groups that might be included in that.

That would certainly help them to know they're eligible to apply for such a grant.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you, that's very helpful. Do you by chance have extra copies of your proposed amended language here today?

MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM: I do not have enough copies for the entire Committee.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: No, just if there were a couple copies, I just want to make sure to put it in the hands of our attorney. Do you have a couple?

MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM: I will get them to you this afternoon.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Terrific, thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Is there anyone else?

REP. REINOSO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Only one minute. I do echo what Chairman Fleischmann said also, I think I told you it's an excellent proposal.

Let me ask you, you mentioned 3,500 students, could you give me the demographics of that, where in the state are these kids, or what part?

MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM: Because this would be a competitive grant program, it would be open to any organization who wanted to provide those, so it could come from any part of the state.

Certainly, I think there's been some discussion that maybe schools that are in need of improvement might receive some special consideration in giving those grants, but it wouldn't be limited to those communities.

REP. REINOSO: Okay. Thank you.

REP. WITKOS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Your proposal sounds similar to that of what would be a resource center.

I'm curious, is there any way that these can be combined to maximize the dollars, or is there a far disparity between the two types of programs?

MICHELLE CUNNINGHAM: These groups, actually, the grant program that I discussed today provides for the after school programs themselves.

The family resource centers in many cases work with us, and some of them do provide that and would be eligible for this. Many of them sometimes just coordinate after school programs.

They might not do the provisions themselves, if there are other providers already in their community.

We certainly work together, but I wouldn't want to speak on behalf of the family resource centers. I'm sure they have people here today that could answer that question better than I could.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much for your time. I know that my boys and girls club in my hometown in Meriden have a lot of kids going through that program each and every afternoon.

It's just been working great, so thank you. Okay. Now you can leave. The next person is Jean Lafave. If I mispronounce the name, please, don't take offense. My eyesight isn't that good.

JEAN LEFAVE: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann and Members of the Committee. I'm Jean Lefave.

I'm the State Relations Chair of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education and member of the Northwestern Region Seven Board of Education. We serve students in grade 7 through 12 in New Hartford, Barkhamsted, Norfolk, and Colebrook.

You have copies of my testimony in front of you, but I'm going to deviate somewhat from it and focus on the ECS and special education grant because I just received information this morning from my sheriff services director.

I think letting you know exactly what's happening in my district might be the best way to address this.

While the proposal to fund the special education excess cost grant is $25 million over '04-'05, this is the only safety net our districts have where the costs are significant and unpredictable.

Those special education placements are not the choices of our boards of education but are required by state and federal law, hearing officers and the court.

The data I received from my special services director this morning showed me that we have 134 special education students in grades 7 through 12, and have a whole population of 1,200 students.

This is 12.8% of our student population. We spend 20% of our approximately $15 million budget on special education for these grades 7 through 12.

Our out-of-district placements are small, but they're extremely expensive. This year we spent $340,000 on ten students, eight of which were DCF placements.

In the past we have received excess cost grant payments in excess of about $55,000 for students placed by the district, and only $11,000 for those placed by the state.

Every year, the state has promised to change this formula and pay a greater share, but it has never followed through.

As the cost of our regular education has increased to the limits I have noted above, we have less and less means for us, as few places ever reach the criterion for district placed students.

In the past this was not so. For example, when the cap was only $25,000 we almost always realized some return on excess costs.

Now, we rarely ever do, and to make matters worse in the past several years, the state has held back approximately 30% of the proposed grant.

This is also true of the state agency placements, where again we receive only 70% of the grant.

Both of these issues need to be addressed, first, to return 100% of the promised excess grant and second to adjust the formula to more up-to-date costs so that we realize a more appropriate excess cost grant.

The grant needs to be funded at least at the 4.5 that you passed last year, and preferably at maybe three times the pupil expenditure.

To compound the problem, state and federal agencies have placed enormous pressure on our district to reduce the number of special education students.

We have taken students out of special education and provided them with non-special education academic support services, but at the same time the state took away the funds we used to receive under Title One to serve the students.

Even as we try to decrease student special education we're being penalized for it. Consequently, additional funds that could be used to service the students are not there.

The proposal to limit the excess cost shearing grant at 2% unfortunately will not even allow the districts to keep up with inflation. As most of you are aware, the education costs are fixed costs established by bargaining, arbitration and other contractual arrangements.

CABE supports the proposal to create a commission on educational finance and responsibility in order to review each relationship of the various programs.

It is important to remember that the state's share of the cost has declined from 4.5% in '89-'90 to 37.6 in '03-'04, leaving our local property tax payers to shoulder the burden.

Just to sum up, taxpayers in our four towns are now refusing to pay even modest increases in our budget. It has taken over six referendums in the past two years with our budget increases only in the 3% to 4% range.

At our high school we have now lost half of our foreign language department and have been unable to make any infrastructure improvements to the school or upgrade our computers in the middle and high school to keep pace with college and workplace requirements.

At a time when the national, local, and state are focusing on quality programs for youngsters to promote student achievement, we commend these initial proposals to provide greater support to meet the needs of the student.

We urge the state to expand its commitment to these important initiatives. We are proud of our public schools in Connecticut, and we need your continued support to build on this progress and address our areas of need.

Thank you very much for your time and commitment to educational funding. I look forward to working with you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much. Now, Jean, you're here as a representative of CABE, and let me say that I agree with your testimony.

I agree on the special education costs because although the law says, currently, that you should get five times, effectively, the funding is probably on average about seven times.

With that, we as a state are grappling with the requirements of federal law on special education.

Let me ask you as an organization, CABE and just in your local district what effort has been mounted in talking to, lobbying the Congressional delegation that could have a direct impact on this, since it is a federal law?

JEAN LAFAVE: I've been a member of the Federal Relations Network also at CABE, and we lobby every year at the federal level.

End of January, first part of February we were there for three days, and we are targeting the federal delegation at all times.

Especially, we also hammer the special education piece that they promised us 30 years ago they were going to do. That's always the first thing we bring up with it.

We have lobbied them. I've been doing lobbying over there for over ten years with Senators and Representatives from my district.

CABE is very active in that capacity. It's very helpful when it's not just CABE, but other people come.

If we get letters from our State Legislators, which I'm sure a lot of people have even on No Child Left Behind, those kinds of issues, it really helps our case. I've been very active in that.

SEN. GAFFEY: That's great. I appreciate your hard work and commitment toward that. As I think about it now, with the additional federal mandates that are funded through No Child Left Behind, looking at it square in the eye.

Then we have the special education mandate, which is, the costs have risen exponentially as you well know over the past several years.

We really have to impress upon our federal Legislators that we need relief here, especially when we have.

Currently, right now we have a Congresswoman who is chairing the Subcommittee on the Ways And Means in Congress, which is where the power is because that's where they decide where the money's going to get doled out.

That message has to get through. You mentioned a commitment the feds made when they passed IDEA, and that was to have 40% of the cost picked up on the federal tab. In Connecticut right now, we're somewhere about receiving 7% maybe from the feds on special education.

I would encourage you and your members to really hone in on that. One, we need waivers and relief under No Child Left Behind because you're not even giving us the money you promised us on IDEA.

If you continue to do that I would appreciate it, but I hear your message as far as the state side and what we need to do.

That's why the Chairman and I have put forth the bills that provide additional funds for special education and ECS.

Any questions from members of the Committee? Thank you very much for your time. The next person on the list is Melissa Mason, representing, is Melissa here?

MELISSA MASON: Good afternoon. First, I want to thank you for the opportunity to testify in favor of House Bill 6823, AN ACT CONCERNING DISCLOSURE AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

Once again, my name is Melissa Mason. I am in my third year of a PhD program in science and African American studies at Yale University.

In addition to working on my dissertation and preparing conference papers, I'm working for it second semester as a teaching assistant.

Ten years ago I was a junior at North Haven High School, and was considering a number of colleges and universities. Having attended a predominantly white high school, diversity was a factor in my college selection.

I would have liked to remain in Connecticut, my family is from here, however I ended up leaving the state to attend the University of Maryland at College Park where one of the proudest selling points was and remains diversity of the student population.

When I arrived, I quickly learned the value of faculty diversity. My favorite teacher who I wanted as a mentor at Maryland was a black woman.

She was also a lecturer. That meant she carried a much heavier teaching load than her tenured and tenure-track faculty, colleagues.

The consequence of this was that she was regarded as a less rigorous scholar by her colleagues because her teachings took time away from her research.

Seeing her treated as a second-class scholar had a profound effect on me. I do not at all regret attending the University of Maryland.

I value the education I received from that institution, however I would like to know not just how many women faculty and faculty of color taught at the university, but how committed the university was to my future teachers.

In thinking about this legislation, I've also thought quite a bit about my nieces, who are currently in the North Haven public school system where there are few, if any teachers of color.

They know I go to Yale. They know I want to be a professor. My niece asked me if I'm going to be a professor at Yale, and I know the answer is probably not.

Yale doesn't usually hire its own PhD graduates, particularly those of color into its tenure track.

It is difficult to tell a girl for whom you hold the highest expectations, who looks up to you, and who has enough self-esteem issues because she's 14, and one of the only black students in her high school what I know about colleges.

I know that good teaching is often not rewarded with respect, and that the people she will most likely look up to during her college years will most likely be regarded as second-rate faculty and scholars in their fields.

It is not good enough for me to tell her from my perspective just what Yale looks like. She deserves to see the evidence for herself.

In conclusion, disclosure is not only important because it would make available to high school seniors crucial information about who is doing the teaching and who will be their mentors once they arrive.

Disclosure also provides institutions of higher education and the people working within them the incentive to address the lack of diversity among the tenured and tenure-track faculties. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much, Melissa, for your testimony. Chairman Fleischmann, the author of the bill, would like to ask you a few questions.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for coming forward. I know that you have a lot of friends who are here with you today and under our lottery system you're dispersed through the list.

You're the one who came up with a high number. We appreciate your taking the time to come up from New Haven. Your testimony focused somewhat on your undergraduate experience at the University of Maryland.

What has been your experience at Yale University in preparing your expectations versus what you have found now that you're there?

MELISSA MASON: My experience at Yale University was that I did expect that, one thing is that I work on issues of labor and race in politics.

One of the things that I did expect, the year that I got in the one person who does race in politics had left to go somewhere else, go to another university.

One thing that I did expect was that since Yale University does want to be the best at pretty much everything that getting the best scholars in as many fields as possible, that would be one of their goals.

Actually, at least from my perspective they've done some of that in hiring a few tenure-track faculty in political science and African American studies.

I'm actually a teaching assistant for one of them right now. In speaking to her about these issues of the two-tiered faculty system where typically women and people of color inhabit the lower-paying and less permanent jobs.

The few faculty of color who are in the tenure-track system or who are tenured often get not just the students who are interested in their fields but also women, people of color, international students for mentoring.

There definitely is an overload when it comes to faculty of color and women who happen to be on the tenure track, as few as there are.

If you look at a lot of the data that's out there, many of them are relegated to the non-ladder positions.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you. That brings me to my other question, which is that the independent colleges are signed up to testify here today.

I think one of the points they're going to make, which they made with me already privately was that this kind of information's already available.

There's no need for state action because we have a federal statute and federal reporting. I'm just interested to get your personal reaction to that argument.

MELISSA MASON: My reaction is just seeing, being part of all the hard work to put together the report that came out earlier this week, that information is rather difficult to gather and get in a way that's easy to understand.

From my perspective this is on one side an issue of people who have a lot of, high school seniors and juniors who have a lot of choices of which colleges to go to.

One of their needs oftentimes is to know who is doing the teaching at these institutions.

It seems to me that if universities and colleges are trying to attract the best students that these factors should be considered and offered front and center on the first page of the website, in a packet that's sent to prospective applicants.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you very much. May I say I find the notion that information that's publicly disclosed should be easily available to the public to be a strong argument.

It troubles me that there are universities talking about how they're disclosing the information, and yet experienced researchers have to spend months digging in order to get it.

To me, public disclosure means you, an applicant, you, a parent, you, a member of the public get the information.

I appreciate the way you've brought that to light and your coming up here today.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Chairman Fleischmann. Just so I understand because I happen to support, it's good when one Chairman supports the other Chairman's bill.

He's got a good bill here, and I commend all of you for working so hard. What did you have to go through to dig out this information?

MELISSA MASON: Part of it is looking at Department of Education statistics. Part of it is oftentimes just looking around, and taking into account department-by-department, university-by-university.

Calling other universities to get their numbers where there're gaps in the existing data.

SEN. GAFFEY: So the U.S. Department of Education had some sort of vague report, you had to look at the statistics and sort of disaggregate it, so it made sense on an apples-to-apples basis?

MELISSA MASON: Well, the Department of Education statistics do compare the universities across the board in a rather standardized way.

In terms of getting some more detailed information university by university, we did have to contact.

SEN. GAFFEY: What kind of detailed information?

MELISSA MASON: Actually, I would be, I could definitely direct you to someone who works very closely on the data in particular, Rose Murphy on the details of that.

SEN. GAFFEY: I see. That's fair. I see she's signed up to testify. We'll see what Rose has to say.

I just want to get a better understanding of the difficulties in getting this information. Thank you very much for coming today.

Any further questions? Thank you. David Kalchiera? Is David here? David Kalchiera? Arthur Criddle? Did I pronounce your name correctly, Sir?

ARTHUR CRIDDLE: Senator Gaffey and fellow Education Committee Members. My name is Arthur Criddle.

I live in Madison, the longest shoreline. I come today to talk about ECS. I'll give you my bottom line, and that is that I would appreciate a state mandate of $1,000 per student.

What I'm about to say is anecdotal. I would call it something that is present whether it is the Mayor of Bridgeport who says that the property tax is not working, or it's me, a resident of Madison who says the same thing. What I heard from Professor Horton was that it's important in the State of Connecticut that we not have discrimination for or against.

As a member of the Town of Madison, I sort of feel that I am wealth-profiled. Thank you for laughing. I really do. I just came up with it ten minutes ago.

I do a lot in the town. I love volunteering. I am the Madison Rotary representative to the Interact Club at our high school. We have 125 students.

We do an awful lot in the community. One of the anecdotes I would like to share with you today is a food cupboard drive that we did out in front of the Stop and Shop.

We had a man come out and put $10 in a pot. He then looked out at the sun and said Madison, you don't need any money in Madison.

There's nobody in Madison that needs a food cupboard. One of my students came up to me with tears in her eyes, and said but I go to school with them.

My wife wrote an article in the newspaper in the opinions section about the 150 families in the Town of Madison that need public assistance.

The other thing that I come to see is that as a member of the aging population, as a card-carrying Medicare person myself, I have seen sale signs go up for people who have lived in Madison for their entire lives because they cannot afford the property tax.

Our property taxes, for some of us, have quadrupled in one year, two years. Many, many court cases have been asked for. Yes, wealth profiled.

People who have a fixed income and who, in the Town of Madison during their years have had property taxes for some of them increase six times.

We are here today in my opinion to understand that there is a sense of fairness that is part of the State of Connecticut.

As Abraham Lincoln said, you cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. My young people who need help, and my older generations are very, very strong.

What we're trying to do is weaken them by making this property tax the only thing that really helps the education in our town. Who would like $1,000 a student?

It's very, very difficult when you have a perception of unfairness to support this government as we in Madison do.

Just remember what happened to Proposition 13 in California. That was the problem.

The problem was the perception of fairness. I ask you, as you redo this [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 1B to Tape 2A.]

--the problem of each individual, not just the growth of a given town. Thank you very much.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Mr. Criddle. I appreciate your impassioned testimony. That was very heartfelt.

As a government of laws we're directed to in this case provide education dollars pursuant to what the Supreme Court ordered us to do.

Unfortunately, a flat grant for student has been ruled unconstitutional by the court.

Therefore, we are unable to give an amount per student, whether it's $1,000 or $2,000 by virtue of that decision even if we wanted to, even if we had the money to do so.

We're caught between a rock and a hard place on that one. That's exactly what the Court ruled against in Horton v. Meskill.

ARTHUR CRIDDLE: Well, what I would like you to do is look at my prepared remarks which have a quote from the constitutionality of the ECS minimum grants by Judith Lowman, chief analyst for the Office of Legislative Research.

If you will look at that I would appreciate it, and I would also hope you would listen to what our State Representative, Deborah Heinrich asked of Professor Horton about the constitutionality. It all goes into the mix. We have our point of view too.

SEN. GAFFEY: You do. And your point of view is appreciated. I can't underscore that enough because I think sometimes there's a perception that the public isn't listened to.

You are. You've got a good argument there, and I appreciate your point of view. Your City Representative was in my office the other day making it to me, so she's working hard on that and I thank you for your time.

Chairman Fleischmann, did you want to add something?

REP. FLEISCHMANN: I just wanted to emphasize that Representative Heinrich has only been up at the capitol for a couple of months now.

I've heard from her more on this issue than I've heard from any Legislator on any issue. Please, know that your concerns are being voiced at the capitol, and within the mandates of constitutional law, we'll be doing what we can to address it.

ARTHUR CRIDDLE: Thank you very much.

SEN. GAFFEY: Representative Boucher would like to ask you a question, Mr. Criddle.

REP. BOUCHER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, and thank you for so eloquently putting into words what so many throughout the state are feeling.

When we get answers that say well, we have no other choice, this is what the law is, well, we are the body of the law, and we make changes all the time.

The future can probably see some changes as time goes on because there's no question that we're perceiving an inequality here.

Notwithstanding maybe six or seven towns that we perceive as highly wealthy there's, out of 169, 122 other towns that seem to be disadvantaged by a formula that appears to have been constructed for fairness.

Yet, as time progresses and variables are added, it becomes clear that it's become a political document rather than a fairness document.

I might add that those 122 towns are not necessarily in reality a wealthy town, and certainly not representative of a particular political party.

In fact, it represents the majority political party in the State of Connecticut. I'm very grateful to you for articulating it so well for us here, and I think we do have a system that seems to be broken.

Your suggestion of at least giving a minimum to all towns and then building up from that is, and seems to be a reasonable suggestion.

It also, I do remember the days when it was constitutionally okay for us to leave special education and transportation costs intact.

In fact, that has now been reduced substantially all over the state. It is putting an undue burden on the middle class, because let's face it, those making $40,000 or less do not pay state income taxes.

Those that pay more do pay income taxes. The truly wealthy certainly are not enough to make a big difference in the long term, and they're also the ones that have the ability to leave.

You're obviously advocating that those that have to stay put and are literally, would you say they're self-funding their town budget at this point?

ARTHUR CRIDDLE: Essentially, yes. What I would say is you have articulated, with information that I don't have, very well what I feel.

I believe that what I presented today is not a lawyer's point of view. It's based on a large group of citizens and also the history of what disaffected citizens can do to harm an educational system.

I've read a lot about Proposition 13 in California. We do know that it hasn't turned out to really help the children, the young people that I'm so closely involved with.

REP. BOUCHER: Do you see a decrease in that population within your community from the standpoint of--

ARTHUR CRIDDLE: No. I see an increase in the number of children in our community. What is happening is that houses are being sold.

What is happening, I have a very small house but these houses are usually fairly large. The children come in, we have more children, and then we'll have maybe another increase in the mill rate in our town and other people will go.

Somehow I feel that education is a national priority that has come down to the states, and from the states to the towns.

I don't think we can, when something becomes broken, which it has over the property tax because of the demographic changes that have occurred that we should go on with the same thing.

I think we really need to have the states have a much larger role in the schools. Make the property tax less, or at least more fair, especially for those who are aging.

Just remember how many voters there are that are aging. Look at the demographics. You're going to see it.

I don't want to see our education system challenged any more than it is.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Just a brief observation. We have a long list of people who are here to testify today, so the Members of the Committee, if you have a question please get to the question mark quickly.

That's for people from both sides of the aisle, both chambers. For members of the public, to the extent that you can be clear and concise in your responses that will help us move things along. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Senator Heinrich.

REP. HEINRICH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the interest of brevity I'll just say thank you very, very much for coming up.

It's people like you that come up to make the effort to speak that make a lot of difference. I couldn't have put it better myself. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Criddle. We also thank you because you have Madison children coming to my city, where our magnet school is the Thomas Edison Magnet School.

It might help out your budget if you sent more of them up to the magnet school. You get a bigger state supplemental grant for doing so. Rosemary Coyle.

ROSEMARY COYLE: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann, and Members of the Education Committee. I'm Rosemary Coyle, president of CEA.

I'm here to comment on Sections One through Seven of House Bill 6680, the Governor's education budget recommendations.

We strongly commend the Governor's interest in the title area of early childhood, but in the area of pre-Kindergarten we do not feel the initiative goes far enough to define a high quality program.

CEA, AFT Connecticut and the Connecticut Superintendents issued a joint statement of principles on pre-K and full-day kindergarten.

The policy statement supports universal access to pre-K and full day kindergarten. A bachelor's degree and certification for pre-K educators, a high quality, developmentally appropriately set of standards and curriculum, measures of accountability to bring all pre-K to the highest levels of quality and a sustainable funding mechanism.

The issue of increasing quality should be central to any pre-K proposal. We believe for any publicly funded pre-K program that a bachelor's degree with advanced training in early childhood development should be the requirement for pre-K educators.

The Department of Education should be the legal agency for pre-K and should implement a plan to dramatically increase the number of certified pre-K teachers, along with a plan to upgrade the current workforce to certification.

Connecticut has been a national leader in developing a highly trained K-through-12 teacher workforce, and should lead in pre-K quality as well.

Attached to my testimony is a proposed legislative amendment that will put us on the path to a highly qualified pre-K workforce.

We recognize that this will not happen overnight, but if we do not raise the bar and implement a plan to reach our goal, more children will suffer the consequences of our inaction.

In our priority districts alone, a recent State Department of Education survey indicated that over 8,000 children need a quality preschool program.

Doctor Jack Shonkoff, Chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child said something last week to the Education and Appropriation Committee members.

If we're really serious about promoting early school success then we should be training and recruiting teachers that have the skills to create exciting learning opportunities as well as to provide social competence and manage emotional and behavioral difficulties.

You know the statistics that as far as investing in young children, we either pay now or we pay later. An investment in quality is a moral imperative, an investment that makes state economic sense.

CEA's objective is to define within Connecticut's school readiness program a high quality pre-K program that has high standards.

The vital component is a highly qualified teacher. CEA has some concern with Section Six, the new age as it is written.

It is our understanding that the language does not reflect its intent. CEA supports developmentally appropriate kindergarten screening.

The current language appears to create a mastery test for kindergarten. CEA would oppose this.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak before you today, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much, Rosemary. In the Governor's budget, she had budgeted for a flat 2% increase. The Governor put a 2% increase on ECS.

What's CEA's position with regard to ECS in recognition of there's this 2% increase in the formula in additional resources to towns, as opposed to the cap for instance?

ROSEMARY COYLE: Our position has always been that you need to raise the foundation, and you need to remove the cap. That's what makes the formula work.

We know the formula works if it's funded properly, if it's used properly. The 2%, which is below the inflation rate of 2.7% this year is really just going to put an undue burden once again on our cities and towns.

SEN. GAFFEY: Questions for Rosemary? Representative Williams.

REP. WILLIAMS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your testimony, Rosemary. In the quick time that you were speaking I think you mentioned you had a proposed amendment attached to your testimony?

I don't think I have that. Would you be able to explain that briefly?

ROSEMARY COYLE: Basically it says by 2009 that the requirement to be a teacher, remember, the teacher is the person in the classroom.

That doesn't mean there aren't other people in the classroom that are going to support the program, but the teacher's going to deliver the educational piece.

By 2009, to be the teacher you could have an associate's degree plus 12 credits in early childhood development, a four-year degree plus 12 credits in early childhood development or be certified with an early childhood endorsement.

By 2012 everyone, meaning the teacher, would have to have certification with an early childhood endorsement.

REP. WILLIAMS: Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you for your question. Any other questions? If not, Rosemary, thank you very much not only for your testimony, but for all the work that you have done to bring the issue of quality and certification on teachers to the attention of the Committee.

ROSEMARY COYLE: Thank you very much, Representative Fleischmann. We will be sending you a booklet that we're printing out on pre-K success stories that highlight both Milford and Bridgeport.

They've actually done research on how the certified teachers' pre-K has worked.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you. We'll keep an eye out for it. Next up is Al Slobodien. Al of CYSA. Welcome.

ALLEN SLOBODIEN: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann, Members of the Committee.

My name is Allen Slobodien. I'm the director of the Community Services Bureau, and a Member of the Advocacy Committee for the Connecticut Youth Services Association, an organization that represents 90 youth service bureaus throughout the state.

Those 90 youth service bureaus serve over 120 communities statewide. I'm testifying in support of House Bill 6802, AN ACT CONCERNING A CONNECTICUT OUT OF SCHOOL TIME GRANT.

Data from extensive national research clearly indicates that school-aged youth engaged in structured after school programs are less likely to come in contact with the juvenile justice system.

Out of school time programs can provide additional academic and social skill building that enable youth to succeed in school and in the community. House Bill 6802 intends to develop a grant program that will address three key areas on the community level.

It means to conduct community strategic planning, funding out of school time slots within the community and the opportunity for out of school time program staff members to access quality training and technical assistance.

I believe that your support of this bill will establish a funding mechanism that can bolster existing out of school time programs and provide seed funding for those communities seeking to develop quality programs that transcend the school day.

There is currently significant emphasis placed on early childhood education initiatives such as school readiness and universal pre-K programs.

The need to continue this quality program for school-aged youth is equally important. Passing this bill out of Committee will provide an opportunity to establish a complementary focus for school-aged children.

Greater numbers of school-aged youth as parents work longer hours are in need of after school, weekend and vacation programs that offer academic assistance, social skill development and cultural enrichment programming.

Youth service bureaus have been empowered via State Statute 10-19M to be quote “the coordinating unit of community-based services to provide comprehensive delivery of prevention, intervention treatment and follow-up services” end quote.

In addition, YSB's under the same legislation are directed to conduct research and resource to development to quote “assess the needs of youth, fill service delivery gaps and create or encourage innovative approaches and programs to meet assessed youth needs” end quote.

An affirmative vote for House Bill 6802 with an eye towards utilizing local youth service bureaus adds value to Connecticut school-aged youth within their communities.

It also helps strengthen community, school and family partnerships that have become a major focus within the State Department of Education. Thank you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you very much for your testimony, for your work with the youth service bureaus, and to advance this cause of after school programs.

Are there any questions? If not, thank you for your testimony. Next up is Michelle James to be followed by Gail Bettin.

MICHELLE JAMES: Good afternoon, Members of the Committee. My name is Michelle James, and I am a student at Hill Regional Career High School in New Haven.

I am here testifying in favor of House Bill 6823. I plan to go to college, and I want to apply to colleges in Connecticut. For most of my high school and school years I never really wanted to go to college. Last year, I got my first A on my report card, so that kind of changed my mind.

I got my A in Ms. Joyner's class, and she inspired me to work hard and go to college. Ms. Joyner was a black teacher, and I had never had a black teacher before.

It was rare to see black teachers in school, and it made me want to impress her. When I go to college, if I see a professor who is African American I want to impress them and work hard in my classes.

My life has changed since I started getting better grades. By achieving my highest academic goals I provide an example for the younger children in my neighborhood of someone who has a future, someone who does not want to go to jail, and someone who really wants to work hard.

I got involved in community activities because of my sister. I saw a black person who was involved in politics and who showed me that you can really make a difference.

I want to make the world better, and now I'm starting to make that happen. I already know how important it is to have a black role model and mentor.

Through actions with teachers and community leaders I've changed my life. Since I know that I want to take classes with at least some black professors, I want to be able to find which colleges have them before I get there.

House Bill 6823 will help me figure out which college will have the right mix of teachers for my needs as a student in Connecticut. I encourage you to support the bill. Thank you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you very much for your testimony. We don't give out grades around here when people testify.

As a former instructor I can tell you, you would have gotten an A for that too. Wonderful job. Are there any questions from Members of the Committee?

If not, we thank you for the leadership we're already seeing from you, and we look forward to hearing what college you'll be going to. Gail Bettin, to be followed by Judy Greiman.

GAIL BETTIN: Good afternoon, Representative Fleischmann, and Members of the Education Committee.

My name is Gail Bettin, and I'm a retired grandmother of a first grade student. I'm also a member at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Hartford, Connecticut.

I'm a Co-Chair of the Education Task Force of the Greater Hartford Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice.

We are a faith-based organization for the organizations, congregations in the greater Hartford area working for systematic change on several issues.

One of them is education, specifically preschool, and that's why I'm here today. Today I'm here to speak to you about the preschool education for three-and-four-year olds and specifically House Bill 6680.

While ICEJ supports some of the contents of this bill, we feel it is very inadequate in its proposed funding for preschool education.

If there is any investment worth making, preschool education is it. Taxpayers are willing to support a quality preschool program that proves in study after study to reduce achievement gaps.

Children are less likely to need special education. They are less likely to repeat a grade than children who do not attend such programs.

They have potential as adults for a better quality of life, higher earning capacity and are less likely to be in the criminal justice system.

Studies of several Connecticut communities prove that children in quality school readiness programs show improved reading, math, language and writing skills.

These improvements occur across all economic and racial groups. They save a great deal of money later on.

ICEJ supports the universal access to quality preschool for three-and-four-year-old children in the state. That is our goal.

As a practical matter, we support the State Department of Education's proposal to add 3,800 preschool spaces over the next two years.

These spaces should serve the priority districts, low income and poorest districts in our communities.

These children are mostly segregated in our large urban centers like Hartford and Bridgeport.

In Connecticut, children from these communities are two times less likely to attend preschool than their wealthy peers, and seven times more likely to drop out of high school.

Studies have also proven that children who are not achieving by the third-grade level do not catch up.

By the age of 8, a child's academic success or failure has been determined. Some states use the third-grade failure rate to forecast their prison populations ten years later.

In conclusion, while there's growing support in understanding of the importance of early childhood education among our State Legislators, business and town leaders.

This understanding needs to translate into action. Last year, February 9^th of 2004, then-Lieutenant Governor Rell publicly announced her support for quality early childhood education on several occasions.

She stated that we can't afford not to make preschool learning a priority. We ask that you at a minimum fully fund the SDE's proposal for preschool education.

By doing so, you will make a sensible investment in the future and well-being of our children and of our state. Thank you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you very much for your testimony and your advocacy. Are there questions from Members of the Committee? If not, I thank you for your testimony.

Just to check one thing, would I be right in understanding on the basis of what you offered today that if it were feasible for the Legislature to establish more spots than are there in the Governor's proposal, that's something ICEJ would be supportive of?

GAIL BETTIN: Yes, in the priority districts.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Next we have Judy Greiman, to be followed by Sharon Palmer.

JUDY GREIMAN: Good afternoon, Representative Fleischmann, and Members of the Committee. I also have Susan Porter from Wesleyan's Institutional Research Department to help in answering any questions that you might have.

On behalf of the member institutions of the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, I'm submitting testimony. I'm here to testify in opposition to House Bill 6823 concerning accountability in education.

The bill seeks to provide for disclosure of statistics concerning race, ethnicity and gender by private educational institutions that receive some state funding.

We feel the requirements of this bill would cause an undue burden on campuses, and create data requirements that are frankly just hard to meet.

There are national requirements and standards around data collection in higher education through the IPEDS system.

IPEDS, which is mandated, used by the federal Department of Education to create volumes of reports on every aspect of higher education data, it's used to populate the fields on the federal college website.

College data collection efforts track the IPEDS survey requirements. The required data collection at the department level that this bill talks about is very difficult.

It uses different definitions than colleges currently use, and would be costly to do. Another key issue is that the federal IPEDS gets into the definitions, which is the race and ethnicity data we need to create under IPEDS is significantly different than what is referenced in the bill under the OMB definitions.

These have a sort of check all that apply, and could lead to colleges having to look at hundreds of combinations of possible race and ethnicity that we would then have to track by department.

Additionally, our software systems as I think none of the currently used academic systems allow for cracking of that multiple ethnic identity information yet. They're working on it.

We would have to do all of this offline with significant data entry and information gathering work. Other issues are that there are some issues, many departments only hire one faculty member a year, and so we would run into some privacy issues.

Reporting, we would run a risk of exposing private information about specific individuals in violation of federal laws. I have to also note that the requirement to post on the home page seems overly intrusive.

College websites are key tools in marketing the institutions and having a look and feel that's appropriate to that institution within this very competitive marketplace.

It would be inappropriate I think to mandate that a private entity be precluded from presenting information about itself on its face to the world, its homepage, in a way that is not in context to the institution as a whole.

Most colleges, if not all do post campus statistics in sort of an about us or college facts section, which can generally be accessed from that front page.

They don't have all of that specific data. In looking at my testimony you'll see a couple other very specific issues with the legislation and the way it's written which I will not get into.

I would just make a couple of other quick points if I may. I believe the real issue that schools have to address is whether their actions to hire minority staff and faculty are listing as many qualified candidates as possible. Are they making sure that these candidates have a fair shake in the hiring process?

This is something that accreditors pay attention to in their evaluations of our institutions, and frankly more importantly this is something that colleges believe in and work on each day.

I think that some of the requirements in this bill would actually derail some of those efforts as people begin to have to spend such significant amounts of time tracking each element to the department level.

I would also close with two quick comments. One is, if this bill is passed I would hope you would look at some of the definitional and data collection issues that we've raised and the changes.

I would hope that you would delay the effective date because I don't know any college that could actually meet this bill on July 1^st, 2005.

There are just way too many things involved here. Finally, I would query why this is singling out private secondary schools and private colleges when frankly, from a private college perspective, the state money that we receive is only in the form of need-based financial aid.

It goes directly to students. You have not put the same requirement on the public colleges, which obviously get far greater state support and would not be required to meet the mandate to this bill.

With that I'm here for any questions you might have.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you for your testimony. We have received a lot of testimony today. I was hunting through to see, did you submit written testimony to the Committee?

I failed to ferret it out for which I apologize. There are some points that you've made that I hear and are well taken.

In your testimony did you include proposals for a modification of the bill if it is to move forward, so that the data categories better match up with data categories that are currently used by dealing with federal reporting?

JUDY GREIMAN: It calls out the specific areas that are problems. The next stepping point out here is the way you could write it, but it does point out the specific areas.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: When it comes to providing information available to students, applicants, parents via the website, do I understand correctly that your objection is that if it's on the homepage then Connecticut universities are disadvantaged vis-à-vis universities in other parts of the country?

If it were something more modest like a link from the homepage to this critical data that would lessen your concern?

JUDY GREIMAN: It would certainly lessen my concern. The way the bill is written, it calls for an excessive amount of data and says it needs to be posted on the homepage, which completely, that changes the dynamics of what that homepage is for.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Right. As you know I'm sure, using the Internet it's possible to have all that data be one click away, with that one click being a link that's on the homepage.

That would allow private universities to maintain the appearance of their web pages as they are now while just adding a single link, right?

JUDY GREIMAN: Or incorporating it into where they currently have facts about us or college facts or what have you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Lastly, for the moment. I can imagine you've been here and have heard some of the testimony we've heard from students of color who talk about how critical it is in their educational experience to have good role models.

How difficult it is for them to currently get the sort of information they would like to have. That was also, I think we'll hear more from the person who prepared this report, The Unchanging Face of the Ivy League.

It's my understanding that they ran into tremendous obstacles to just get basic information about what percentage of tenured faculty was female or of color. I'm interested to hear your response to those concerns that have been raised.

JUDY GREIMAN: You know, in a large measure I'd like to understand where they went to look for the data. I understand this is a question.

Much of that data is around. The State Department of Higher Education has data on these issues. The IPEDS tracks much of that data. It doesn't do it by department, as you suggested.

It doesn't do it by major and by the way students in our sector don't even choose majors until the end of their sophomore year, which would cause a huge problem with the way you've laid out some of that.

It does do it by student, full-time faculty or part-time faculty. It does do it by student categories, but not quite to the detail that you have here.

Some colleges have it within their about us place on their website. Some colleges have it in their campus fact books.

Some colleges I guess you would have to call. Some of it you can get through the school website.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: I thank you for that candid response. I think it sort of underscores one of the reasons this bill is before us.

It's my belief that a student who's applying to an array of colleges and universities shouldn't have to figure out a different spot for every institution they have to go to get the information.

I think if we're trying to make this process friendly to students and parents who care about these issues, they should be able to have a simple hyperlink on their homepage to get the information.

They shouldn't have to be calling some schools, hunting through some schools' texts. That's part of the impetus for this legislation.

JUDY GREIMAN: If I might respond to that. I guess I would say that these, again I would go back to what is the purpose of the campus website.

Within the really extremely competitive market of today, those websites are there to market the institution in a way that makes sense for that institution.

I'm not advocating institutions to hide information, to have information available. I do think that you need to be careful in terms of how you choose to regulate these institutions in away that you don't end up impacting how they market themselves.

I would say particularly, frankly, because these are private institutions that do not receive state funds for their operation.

It kind of brings me back to why we're not putting the same requirements on the many public institutions that do receive state funding. I just don't understand that.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Well, let me just s ay that's a fair point. I don't have a problem having the same requirements for all institutions of higher education, public and private.

I guess I'd also observe that you used the term marketing several times in the last couple of minutes.

It greatly troubles me to consider that revealing the actual data that these universities have with regards to the number of tenured faculty who are women or people of color or Latino would hurt their market.

That says to me that there's something wrong with the institutions, not that there's something wrong with the proposal.

If an institution is upholding the values that it espouses when it talks about a diverse community then that's reflected when they offer to the public accurate data with what's happening with their faculty.

JUDY GREIMAN: I don't disagree with you, Representative. I do disagree with the mandate as to the where and the how on a homepage.

I don't disagree that we can have the information available, and that's actually quite relevant information for many people if they look at choosing colleges.

It's more about that you understand that it is a marketplace and that we look at how we mandate folks to change what they have and the way they portray their look and feel.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: I hear your concern. I think, obviously, this is the first draft of the legislation.

We'll be taking your concerns into account when we deal with the drafting. Are there other questions from Members of the Committee? Representative Shapiro.

REP. SHAPIRO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You had mentioned earlier in your presentation that this would add additional costs to the universities. Have you had an opportunity to quantify those costs?

JUDY GREIMAN: I haven't had an opportunity to quantify it. I'm not sure if it's useful to have Steve talk a little bit about what to get to that departmental-level data, and to use those OMB categories, what that would actually mean.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I can talk a little bit about that. I think first of all the costs are going to vary quite a bit by school.

Smaller schools can do a lot of counting by hands because they're small, and they can do that, so then the cost is pretty big.

Some places like Wesleyan where they have a pretty advanced IT system and database the cost would be less because I can do most of that sort of programming at my desk.

As for the OMB race and ethnicity categories, that's a huge issue. As she said, we report data annually to the Department of Education, particularly to the National Center of Education Statistics.

Every couple of years they've announced they're postponing implementation of the OMB definitions because they can't figure out what to basically count ways in which all of their constituencies would be happy.

Because of that, all the schools have held off on the reprogramming. In fact, just a few months ago I think the Department of Education announced it would be in 2006 at the earliest that they would come up with some sort of system for schools to report.

That part would be particularly costly because you're talking in many cases reprogramming databases. In other words, many schools track students and faculty with only one category per person.

You're asking me to create multiple categories to allow people to choose more than one race and ethnicity.

REP. SHAPIRO: If the language were amended as we suggested earlier to more directly correlate to the federal guidelines, that would obviously shrink your costs?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: That would obviously work very much. In fact, that's exactly what the college guidebooks, for example US News, when they ask schools for data they always say IPEDS definition or the AUP definition precisely because it makes it easier on them.

REP. SHAPIRO: Are you reimbursed at all by the federal government for collating the data and getting the data?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No, we are required to do that as a condition of receiving federal financial aid for our students.

JUDY GREIMAN: Which, if I could just add, that's why IPEDS is used in just about any survey they use the IPEDS categories.

It's mandated by the federal government. It's whatever colleges now set up, that's how we collected that. That's how we report it.

If you look at just about anything from the US News to the National Center for Education Statistics to the Department of Higher Education in Connecticut, they use IPEDS data.

This kind of blows it all away. This says forget your IPEDS categories, we're just going to create something different.

While it might be ultimately where higher education goes it's not there yet. The very people who work with the data can't figure out how to get it there.

REP. SHAPIRO: Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you, Sir. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Next is Sharon Palmer from AFE Connecticut, once, twice. Darlene Ragozzini from CCAC. Good afternoon, Ms. Ragozzini.

DARLENE RAGOZZINI: Senator Gaffey is not here, and Representative Fleischmann and all the other distinguished Members of the Education Committee, my name is Darlene Ragozzini. I'm executive director of Connecticut Charts-A-Course.

I'm here to offer you comments today on Raised House Bill 6680, AN ACT IMPLEMENTING THE GOVERNOR'S BUDGET RECOMMENDATIONS CONCERNING EARLY CHILDHOOD, and House Bill 6802, AN ACT CONCERNING CONNECTICUT OUT OF SCHOOL TIME.

As executive director of Connecticut Charts-A-Course, the state's career development system for early care in education and program improvement I clearly support the intent of both of these bills as they raise the bar on staff qualifications and program standards.

I wholeheartedly support the creation of an early childhood investment advisory cabinet as the establishment of a state governing body with responsibility for the vision, direction and programs in early childhood education.

I would just like to offer one amendment to that cabinet makeup that it be amended to include representation from the Department of Higher Education as well as the integral elements of delivering quality programming to young children.

Clearly, as we've heard here today already, is the qualifications and training of the staff who teach them.

This Committee has heard me testify many, many times over the past years about the correlation between the research and the stability of caregivers, their qualifications and outcomes for young children.

Indeed, I've quoted before the Cassidy et al study, which looked at the effect of college course work on caregiver beliefs and practices.

This particular study found that after enrolling in an associate degree program in early childhood education or early childhood development and completing 12 to 20 hours of community college coursework.

Participants in the study demonstrated significantly more developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices for young children than those who did not attend college classes.

This bill creates awards of up to $3,000 for existing employees of a school readiness program for the purpose of earning an associate's degree.

I would recommend that be amended to also include degrees in early childhood education. The language really just says child development.

It does not include early childhood. As you know, Connecticut Charts-A-Course has as one of its components a scholarship assistance program.

It funds income-eligible individuals who earn less than 50% of the state median income. All of the people that we fund make less than that.

Last year we had $145,000 in scholarship money. With that money we were able to provide over 500 scholarships for entry-level training, but only 70 scholarships for people who wanted to take courses for an associate's degree.

Now, if you do the math and you currently look at the community college system, there are 1,900 students enrolled in Connecticut community colleges in early childhood education programs. Nearly 400 of these students have accrued more than 30 credit hours or more toward a degree.

At $3,000 per year per person we could award 330 scholarships to individuals to take approximately ten or more courses a year to complete a degree in early childhood education at the associate degree level.

I just think that this money would really be able to push people through the career development system.

I would add that in your packet hopefully it's got a grid that just shows the levels of the Connecticut Charts-A-Course career ladder, the training that's required for each level, the amount of money it takes to move people through the system.

Also, there's a column that has an educational bonus for each level, which is not currently a part of the system but that I would recommend you look at with great interest.

I also support House Bill 6802. We worked closely with the School-Age Alliance and we feel that that language would also help us to continue to work with that constituency to help build their qualifications.

I'm sorry I ran over, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

REP. REINOSO: Questions from the Committee? James Murphy.

[Changing from Tape 2A to Tape 2B.]

JAMES MURPHY: Good afternoon, Members of the Committee. My name is James Murphy. I'm from Trinity College, and I will be arguing for House Bill 6823.

I'd like to speak to you today of my experience of faculty diversity. I grew up in western Connecticut, a small wealthy and predominately white town in southern Connecticut. There was no diversity in west Connecticut.

The guidance counselors during my college application process had no statistics on diversity handy during my college search.

It was not until after I arrived at Trinity College that I realized how important a factor racial diversity was in the application process and my experience as a college student.

My experience here at Trinity has only been slightly different than my experience at home.

There are a few minority students, but Trinity College is a small, primarily white liberal arts college in Connecticut.

Conversation with people who did not grow up in an all-white neighborhood with all-white friends is difficult to find.

Why is it that I'm even seeking out this conversation? What benefit is it to me? Why would a college freshman who has grown up in a rich, white suburban setting care about diversity?

After all, there's no reason for me not to feel comfortable here. Why should I, or any of my white peers for that matter, care at all about diversity?

The answer is that no matter how racially homogenous my former high school life may have been, college is meant to be a time when I am expected to face something different than what I grew up with.

This is the time and place for me not only to learn about geometry and medieval history, but how to live in and interact with the broader world, which is not homogenous.

Neither my peers nor I will be able to succeed in this world if we are learned from no other opinion or point of view, if we do not have the opportunity to know and respect both students and professors from other backgrounds than our own.

How does this apply to the application process? The problem is that determining the degree of racial diversity among faculty at a small liberal arts college, Connecticut school or college, is a daunting task.

Statistics about the diversity of students and faculty are not provided in a uniform and comprehensible fashion.

The Princeton Review and Fiske Guides devote a section of their analysis to the diversity of both students and faculty.

The schools are free to refuse to release the information, and the sections are often left blank.

At Trinity College, where some statistics are provided, there's no information on how many of the racially diverse faculty members at Trinity, who represent 17% of the entire faculty hold temporary, visiting, associate or tenure-track positions.

Wesleyan University provides an equally vague statistic, claiming that 14% of faculty members are of a racially diverse background.

And Connecticut College put international students and students of color in one category without any faculty data at all. This is an issue that small liberal arts schools have ignored.

It's been up to intrepid high school students to figure out what information they need and how to get it. Connecticut schools must do more than simply meet applicants halfway.

This data should be readily available, so that students can take the faculty into account when they make their decisions on where to go.

The current disclosure is inconsistent and inadequate. What statistics are provided, they are merely ornaments sculpted to make the college seem more diverse.

The truth is that none of these schools are entirely honest because none wants to be known for their lack of diversity.

If we are to fix the greater problem we must begin with disclosure. We have an opportunity to set precedent, to be the first state that has decided to take this issue head on. I urge you to support House Bill 6823. Thank you very much for your attention. I will accept any questions at this point.

REP. REINOSO: Mr. Murphy, I'd really like your statements in terms of diversity and trying to change the format of different colleges and institutions for higher education.

It is true, in Connecticut we have the opportunity to have a mosaic of different cultures.

You're sitting right in front of someone who is different than you in terms of race and cultural background.

The state's changing and I'm not speaking on behalf of the Committee, but particularly in my case I really enjoy it. I think I would support your request. Representative Williams.

REP. WILLIAMS: Thank you, Chairman Reinoso. It sounds good, Chairman Reinoso. Thank you for your testimony. I'm just trying to get a little bit of a handle on the situation.

I've been approached on this issue by a number of folks in the hallways here. When you went to Trinity, I'm assuming you visited the campus prior to your applying. Were you lied to?

Did you ask questions about the diversity of the faculty and that sort of thing? Was there silence on the part of the person who you asked, or were you lied to? I'm trying to get a little bit of a handle on this.

JAMES MURPHY: To be honest, my high school experience and the town I grew up in was so homogenous in terms of race, it was almost entirely white, that it wasn't an issue I even considered until I arrived at Trinity.

Until I was severed from contact with my home and what I knew, I realized how different things were not only at Trinity, but the outside world.

It was really the first time I wasn't leaving from a home base with parents, people that I knew. I was out in a world that was different. It really took an immersion in that environment for me to even understand that this was going to be a big deal. It was a big deal.

Trinity is known for being particularly, I might even say arrogant sometimes about the wealth that we come and so forth. It's been a problem.

When I did apply, there was no emphasis put on it. There was no attempt made by the admissions staff to present this information to me.

If you ask, was I lied to? No, because I didn't know who to ask no opportunity was presented.

REP. WILLIAMS: That makes sense. I understand where you're coming from. You don't remember seeing anything mailed to your house or any brochures, any paraphernalia at all from the university that described the diversity of the faculty?

JAMES MURPHY: The only statistic I ever saw was that one 17%. Trinity does do a decently good job.

They do have a college facts section in which they present the percentage of faculty from a racially diverse background, which I take to mean non-white, to be 17%.

They also present that the last year's makeup of the student was 19% of racially-diverse background, once again, essentially non-white. The problem is there is very little distinction in terms of tenure-track, associate, visiting.

I've received no data whatsoever along those lines of how many of these professors were minority professors, of racially diverse background and so forth.

How many minority professors were tenure-track professors? Basically, if I'm trying to apply to a school as another person of color or racially-diverse background I have no idea if that professor that I have freshman year will still be there when I'm a senior to write me my recommendations.

I have no idea if they're going to advise me when I decide to look for a job. Thank God they may be there to help me adjust to the campus, but frankly I have the advantage as not a person of color, as a rich white as I expressed in my previous testimony.

I have the advantage of having a plethora of professors there who will be there the entire step of the way to advise me, recommend me if I am recommendable and everything along that line.

There is no information letting applicants of diverse backgrounds know if they will have the same opportunity. That's a problem. That's why I'm here today.

REP. WILIAMS: That makes sense. I appreciate you taking the time to come. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I kind of know where you're coming from because my family had the same type of situation.

My daughter came from a high school similar to yours and went to a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania.

She came home indicating that it was like going to high school again. In your community, where you came from, how important do you think it is to the students in a community to look for diversity in a college?

JAMES MURPHY: I'm sorry, students in high school? To be honest, Trinity is a lot like my high school also, where one of the problems is that there's a general apathy not from ignorance but I want to say a naiveté in terms of there's just no exposure to other races and so forth.

If there's a concern on the part of the students to find this diversity, absolutely not. They really have no faculty for creating that desire because they're existing in sort of a state of apathy.

They're existing amongst people they've always known, races they've always known and they really don't know how to change that per se. The short answer is no. It's a little bit more complicated than that.

REP. DAVIS: These statistics if they were available would probably be much more helpful to students of color who are looking for diversity rather than white students.

JAMES MURPHY: Absolutely, and that's an excellent point also. The point I'm trying to make is that hopefully as these things start to change, if schools like Trinity, if Trinity said to me hey, guess what, half of our faculty are from a diverse background.

I mean, you have a professor who's teaching African history and they're actually from Africa.

If the schools start to assert that information, I'm hoping that it will start causing these high school students to scare.

It will present to them through this application process this new point of view that wasn't there before at all.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you. Mr. Chairman.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you, Representative Davis. Any questions from the Committee? If not, thank you, Mr. Murphy.

JAMES MURPHY: Thank you very much.

SEN. GAFFEY: Let me call Mike Graner. Just for the people that are here still, I appreciate you hanging in.

Sometimes we have to eat, so I'd rather excuse myself than eat in front of you. I don't think it looks good. Now that I've had some nourishment I'm back. Mr. Graner.

MIKE GRANER: I'm delighted to be here. My name is Mike Graner, and I'm the superintendent of schools from Ledyard, Connecticut.

I'd like to address Raised Senate Bill 1212, which is an act concerning special education funding.

In southeastern Connecticut we have two public departments that serve the needs of children.

One, the State Department of Children and Families, DCF, we also have the Mashantucket Tribe's Department of Child Protective Services.

Both agencies occasionally have to remove children from unsafe homes and place them in foster care.

The Mashantucket Child Protective Services supports at-risk tribal children and thereby reduces the caseload for the frequently overburdened DCF workers.

The Child Protective Services is a great asset to Ledyard as it is to the other towns surrounding the Reservation, North Stonington, Norwich, Preston and so forth.

It is also a valuable companion agency to DCF, however the current law places a significant financial burden on boards of education when the Child Protective Services agency places a special education child.

When DCF places a child the town is required to pay one time its per-pupil expenditure for that child.

When the Mashantucket Child Protective Service Agency places a child, the town has to pay five times its per-pupil expenditure.

In effect, indicating the school system made that decision when in fact it was the Child Protective Services.

The reason for that is because the Child Protective Services is not considered a public agency under the law.

The consequences for Ledyard can run as much as about $100,000 a year. The Raised Bill would basically allow Child Protective Services to be recognized as a public agency.

It would alleviate an unfair burden on both Ledyard and the towns surrounding it as well as continue a productive collaboration between DCF and Child Protective Services.

In summary, basically the bill will support children, it will support the local boards of education and it will support a key state agency.

I strongly encourage your support. Thank you very much for listening to my testimony.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, and can you give me an idea of how many children we're talking about?

MIKE GRANER: In terms of special education, children perhaps five or six, but not all of them involve extensive special education services.

In terms of severely impacted, perhaps two or three a year. For Ledyard, that means about $36,000 per child assuming we have to pay five times.

SEN. GAFFEY: The children are from the Reservation?

MIKE GRANER: They're either from the Reservation or they're tribal children who live off the Reservation but the Tribe serves them just the same. They're Mashantucket children.

SEN. GAFFEY: DO you know how many are from the Reservation?

MIKE GRANER: There are 39 total. I'm not talking about Child Protective Services. There are 39 children who reside on the Reservation who attend Ledyard schools.

SEN. GAFFEY: Does the Tribe have their own school?

MIKE GRANER: They do not. They have a child development center, which has a kindergarten, a preschool program. The majority of the children come to Ledyard public schools.

SEN. GAFFEY: They live on a sovereign nation's land?

MIKE GRANER: They live on a sovereign nation, and the Child Protective Service Agency is a department of that sovereign nation.

SEN. GAFFEY: I'm just struck at the dichotomy. I'll have to look at this under law, but I'm struck by the dichotomy of when it comes to sovereign nation land they don't have to abide by any of the state law requirements yet they are recipients of the benefits of the state.

That to me is a troublesome dichotomy as I sit here right now. I'd never actually thought about it, but through your testimony, and I thank you for your testimony.

It's just such a startling dichotomy that they get the benefits from our state and local governments yet they want to be held and are held under law as a sovereign nation exempt from the requirements of our laws.

MIKE GRANER: I believe there will be testimony later, there's an attorney here representing the Mashantucket Tribe.

She can talk a little bit more about Indian Child Welfare Act I think it's called. There are some federal laws that require or allow Native American children to come to schools.

It's just been a frustrating issue for me that we have an agency that when a child is at risk typically would be serviced by DCF.

When DCF realizes the child has tribal connections, it transfers the child to Child Protective Services.

SEN. GAFFEY: What's troublesome to me is that we have a situation where we have the largest grossing casino in the world and yet are looking to the State of Connecticut to pick up these costs.

That may be required under federal law, I'm not sure of it but I thank you for your testimony. Anyone else have questions? Yes, Representative.

REP. REYNOLDS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and in the interest of full disclosure Ledyard and the Reservation are in my district.

I just wanted to refer the Committee to the memo from the Office of Fiscal Analysis relative to this bill that might shed a little more light on fiscal impact and see if you agree with their assessment of the number of children involved and what have you.

Their analysis is that there would be an average of two to three children a year that would be affected, with an average of $38,000 per student, that is the delta between the one-times and the five-times reimbursement.

Their position is that the fiscal impact to the state is zero, the argument being that excess cost legislation funds are capped and that the state will not spend any more than what's budgeted.

Therefore, the impact might be a negligible impact on other communities in the state.

They've calculated that assuming that the cap continues the impact on other communities would be an average of $500 per district, largely negligible given we're spending $92 million Governor-proposed on special education.

Do you agree with their assessment on the number of children and the dollar figures associated?

MIKE GRANER: Yes, I do. It would be a maximum of two or three if history serves. Of course, if we are allowed, as we are hoping, to have children be counted as one-time per-pupil expenditure, the additional amount would go towards the cap.

REP. REYNOLDS: I do understand, and the Chairman rightly referred to this, that any town could be affected by this because this is not just children on the Reservation.

If a tribal family lives in Meriden or West Hartford or Bridgeport the Child Protective Services Office could still make an out-of-district placement and that nexus community would still be responsible for the payment of services.

MIKE GRANER: That is 100% true.

REP. REYNOLDS: It's really not a parochial issue. There's a statewide question. Is it also true that the Mohegan Tribe doesn't have such an office but could in the future create one?

MIKE GRANER: That's true. They do not currently have, they don't have a commercial reservation and they don't have a child protective service agency.

REP. REYNOLDS: That potential exists and if any future federally-recognized tribes emerged they too could take one. This is a potentially emerging issue then.

MIKE GRANER: Yes, and certainly regional.

REP. REYNOLDS: Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much, Sir. Jim Finley. Is Jim still here? John Stamm. Hello, John.

JOHN STAMM: I'm John Stamm. I'm a resident of West Hartford, and I'm very happy that my Representative serves on this Committee. I'm a member of the Interface Coalition for Equity and Justice.

I'm also a retired professor of neuropsychology at the State University of New York. I don't want to give a lecture, so I will read my notes now.

I'm very supportive of early childhood education. I was engages for many years in research with pupils who were enrolled in New York and the upper grades of primary schools for learning disabled children. At that time, sometime ago, pre-kindergarten education was not generally available at that time.

In our research we first administered tests of conceptual, cognitive and language to these students.

We found that while the academic competence had improved consistently with the special education methods they never caught up with their age-mate controls who attended regular schools.

The measure of the developmental lack had actually increased during the primary school years.

Now, I want to give a great deal of credit to the special education procedures, which made it possible for these students to progress at all.

The next thing we did is we looked at their brains a little bit to see if they were different from other children.

We conducted experimental research where we measured indicators for brain activation while the children performed a task. These children had attentive or reading deficiencies.

They were selected for their deficiency. What we found was very substantial reductions in the magnitude of this presence of brain activity by the experimental groups compared with those of the normal.

We also looked a little bit at different patches of brain and the differences were most pronounced from the cortex, cortical segments that mediate the central functions that are required for cognition and linguistic talents.

In other words, brain areas that are involved in thinking and language. These are the prefrontal and the cortical segments.

These findings are indicative of inadequate development of these higher brain structures.

Research in anatomy has found that the neurons in the cortex develop a complex network, but this is very poorly structured at birth, subsequently, growth in size and complexity to very beautiful networks in people in childhood and adolescence.

What's important is the most rapid rate of this growth occurs during the first four years of life. Then the growth becomes more gradual.

Also, it has been found that the rate of development of this anatomical structure is strongly affected by stimulation from other cerebral areas that involve adequate sensory, perceptual and cognitive activity.

Furthermore, deprivation of such stimulation during early childhood was found to result in markedly retarded development of this cortical network.

Now, I could say in general that many investigations in neurology, biology, psychology and education have substantiated the crucial importance of the child's first four years as a foundation for the effective acquisition of academic and social skills.

There's a lot of evidence in neurology and biology that between four and five years the development of the brain changes very much--

SEN. GAFFEY: Mr. Stamm, if I could ask you to summarize as we've gone beyond the time.

JOHN STAMM: --the deficiency in learning of basic abilities is most difficult if not impossible to overcome during the child's later years.

Consequently, the opportunity for early childhood education during three and four years old must become available for every child. It's clear from the children's brains that they need to be educated.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. You know, we had a couple years back, Dr. Ziegler came up here from Yale.

He similarly talked about early brain development. It was fascinating to me, and since that time I've read a number of articles on it.

Certainly, I think those of us who have been on this Committee for a while have grasped the priority of early childhood and the relationship to the synapses that are developing very rapidly in the brain of a child during their earliest years.

How they can absorb so much at such a young age. I appreciate your testimony, and I thank you for your advocacy on behalf of the children of not only West Hartford, but the State of Connecticut.

JOHN STAMM: You might communicate with my Representative who right now is busy somewhere else.

SEN. GAFFEY: Yeah. he just had to step out for a short period of time. He'll be back. He's a pretty smart guy himself and a really good Legislator.

I dare say I haven't seen any that are more dedicated than Andy Fleischmann is to his constituency. He'll be back fairly shortly actually.

JOHN STAMM: Thank you. I just wanted to talk.

SEN. GAFFEY: You can buttonhole him outside and get him to talk one on one.

JOHN STAMM: I just wanted to talk from the brain's point of view.

SEN. GAFFEY: There you go. Thank you very much, Mr. Stamm. Helene Figueroa.

HELENE FIGUEROA: Good afternoon. My name is Helene Figueroa. I live and vote in Hamden. Good afternoon, Representative Heinrich.

I work with the Connecticut Association for Human Services and the Legislative Collaborative for Early Care in Education.

Both are members of the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance, which is an organization of more than 30 groups that have come together.

They picked number 57, so they have testimony that you'll need to read on your own.

I would ask if you could fish out my sheets, only because there are a couple of charts there that will be much easier for you to look at while I speak.

Thank you for allowing me to speak today. This is a really great time for the early care in education field.

House Bill 6680 is a tremendous leap forward in the Executive Branch's recognition that as a state we should support parents in the awesome task of raising our future citizens.

We all will need to play ball with the Governor. I would like to make a deal with you.

I'll promise I'll only be three minutes if you promise to read the rest of my testimony because I'll abbreviate it.

Deal? Okay. I hope the attached charts, which is I think page three there are charts, will help you understand the positive significance of the Governor's proposals and the potential impact it will have on the early care and education system such as it is.

If you look at the top of that chart ECE, which is our acronym for early care in education, planning coordination and oversight.

We desperately need a centralized government structure that can pull together the disparate pieces of a really complicated system of funding, set goals for child outcomes and hold all stakeholders accountable.

She's put in a considerable amount of money to fund sort of the infrastructure pieces. I didn't go into detail here exactly what they are.

The bill calls them out, and my last page of testimony has some comments about each individual point.

Facilities development, absolutely critical, workforce development, absolutely critical, but neither of those are going to go anywhere if the providers, the programs have money for debt service and have money for paying teachers.

The $17 million is basically an addition of the per-child increase and the $11 million in school readiness enhancement.

The right-hand column actually spells out the four other programs that actually are the backbone of the early care in education system.

I think it's time that we kind of recognized that high quality childcare is an incredible boost to school readiness. It provides the education that's needed.

If you look at the second sheet or the fourth sheet there is an increase in school readiness. DSS-funded centers are woefully per-child under funded.

The State Department of Education state dollars for Head Start are woefully under funded.

Separated somewhat is the care for kids because you need all four of these pots of money to make it work. Are there questions on that?

SEN. GAFFEY: I don't have any. Representative Heinrich.

REP. HEINRICH: Hi, it's good to see you again. I just have a quick question. I know in a discussion we had earlier you had mentioned that preschool programs, pre-K programs, one of the difficulties in preschool programs is getting children from daycare programs to pre-K programs in fact.

Did you want to elaborate on that at all?

HELENE FIGUEROA: Basically, my position is that childcare is high quality preschool if childcare is high quality childcare.

You've got state-funded centers and Head Start programs and the Care 4 Kids program that are providing full-day, full-year services to the same kids that you're targeting for school readiness.

You're woefully under funding those to the point where the dam's about ready to break. It's kind of like if you look at school readiness as the Alaskan pipeline, and you say okay, we've got a really great, strong underpinning here.

Then you've got to think about that Microsoft screen saver with all the pipes that go in and out and they're all convoluted and change hues and all of that.

That's really what the system looks like. The pipeline, unfortunately, is full of holes.

Unless you plug those holes before you expand school readiness we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

We're biting off our nose to spite our face because we're saying education is here, childcare is here.

That has got to stop. SDE and DSS need to start holding hands. I think Legislators need to really understand the complexity of the situation and that you can't do quality childcare on a shoestring.

You can't expect parents to work. All of these are poor kids whose parents are working and that's a good thing.

Here we are saying we're not going to honor the fact that parents are working, and so we're going to make it kind of like, try to figure out a system where you go one place for education and another for childcare.

Good quality childcare, accredited centers with good teachers that have all the same criteria as school readiness need to be shored up before we expand. Are there questions on the grids, or?

SEN. GAFFEY: Any other questions? Thank you very much. Dave Calcherra.

DAVID CALCHERRA: Senator Gaffey, Members of the Committee. I'm here to speak on Proposed House Bill 5529, the establishment of a per-student grant for economically disadvantaged small towns.

I've provided you with written testimony and I've also brought along testimony from Louise Barry, Superintendent of schools in Brooklyn, Superintendent Estazio from Plymouth and perhaps others who have submitted them along with me.

I will summarize my written comments in just a minute or two. I'll start with recognizing the statutory response to Sheff v. O'Neill, which has been to reduce the racial, ethnic, and economic isolation of our towns and cities.

We've made a tremendous effort with the very real issue of racial isolation in our cities with almost no regard for the economic isolation of poor kids in broke communities.

The direct effects of poverty are seen equally in zip codes of northeast Connecticut and other pockets of poverty around the state as they are in our major cities.

The instance of domestic abuse, child molestation, low infant birth weight and all that follows.

Those things that attend to difficulties with learning all exist in poor, small, mainly rural communities.

Exacerbating the difference between the support that's provided to urban centers and wealthy suburbs is that along with an intervention to reduce racial isolation there are added opportunities throughout these suburbs in terms of the opportunity for students to attend magnet schools, be involved in intra-district activities etcetera for which rural communities are entirely ineligible.

Add it to the fact that around urban centers there are generally opportunities such as a decent transportation system, museums, cultural opportunities, foundations and corporations who understand the importance of supporting local schools.

That is not the case in rural, poor communities in Connecticut. There is precedent for categorical grants in addition to ECS funding.

I should mention that ECS funding is part of this but has not really addressed the specific needs of rural poor towns.

The more that ECS is reconfigured, the more the state-to-local contribution to the increase in local school budgets seems to diminish.

ECS is really not our answer. There is precedent for categorical funding. It's called the priority school district.

The definition of priority school districts exists somewhere in the distant past. If you take the priority school district, the characteristics of the communities receiving priority school district grants and match them against the composite statistics of our poorest 25% of towns with populations below 30,000 you have towns that in composite have per capita income that's within hundreds of dollars of the average priority school district.

Equalized grant lists, which are actually below that of priority school district, town wealth that is substantially below that of priority school districts.

We think that we, in northeast Connecticut and other towns and communities affected by instances of poverty with small populations feel that a categorical grant will go a long way toward providing the direct support that they need.

We think it's time for a rural agenda in addition to an urban agenda in Connecticut. Thanks for your time.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much. I must say that I've had more than one conversation about this.

You've had some very strong advocates on the House side too, as I see Representative Johnston standing in the back there.

Certainly, Representative Mikutel of this Committee, Representative Pawelkiewicz welcome. We've got a lot of people here from northeastern Connecticut. You know, you're right.

I've looked at the data and I've seen where a lot of your communities up in your areas, from Representative Mikutel's area up through northeastern Connecticut where you have gotten short shrift on these formulas.

There are a couple of ways of looking at it. You say ECS really isn't the answer for you, well, it may be if we reconfigure it the right way.

Reflecting, you're not going to like this where you come from, but reflecting the mill rate from your town dedicated to paying education, for instance.

When you look at the statistics from the proportion of the mill rate, how many mills that Brooklyn, for instance, puts towards education as compared to other towns there's a stark difference there.

This is supposed to have an excess to property taxes, so I think that's a good way of looking at it when you look at effective education mill rate per town spent on education.

It starts painting a really interesting picture. I'm actually looking at that right now related to ECS.

Secondly, if we can never get there I think you're correct in that we have to adopt some sort of a categorical grant.

Maybe we'll call it the composite grant to recognize the need out there in rural communities that just don't have the property wealth or the income wealth.

I can think of three priority school districts that far exceed you both in property and income wealth.

I thank you for your testimony, and just to let you know that the House Chairman and I have worked on this for the pats several weeks. We're going to be working with all of our colleagues here, both in this Committee and the Appropriations Committee with the leadership to try to come up with something that's far fairer to all of your communities. Questions? Representative Mikutel.

REP. MIKUTEL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm glad that you're here, David, to explain this need for another categorical grant that addresses the unique needs of the poor rural communities.

I'm glad to hear the comments of our Chairman, who grasps the needs out there. As I understand it there are 36 towns that would benefit from such a categorical grant that addresses these communities. Is that true?

DAVID CALCHERRA: I believe there're 35.

REP. MIKUTEL: The total cost for addressing this issue is what amount, in terms of bringing them up to the same status as a given priority school district?

DAVID CALCHERRA: Approximately $9.5 million.

REP. MIKUTEL: Nine and a half million dollars? Okay. Thank you. I think your presence here today will allow Members of this Committee and all those Legislators who are listening to understand there is another group of communities in our state that really have not been given the equity that they need in terms of education funding.

This proposal hopefully will create some more interest in that, as the Chairman has stated. I thank you for your presence here and your testimony.

I think it's beginning to create an awareness that there's a whole group of communities out there that we need to address that aren't being addressed through the current ECS formula. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Representative. Representative Pawelkiewicz, go ahead.

REP. PAWELKIEWICZ: Thank you, Tom. I just want to thank you for your kind remarks and just make a comment, which really reinforces what you said.

In our community of every local tax dollar, $.75 of that local tax dollar goes for education. It really shows that there's not much left after that.

I really want to thank you for your deep thoughts on this issue and look forward to working with you on it.

SEN. GAFFEY: Anything further? Thank you very much for your testimony. Tom Buckley.

TOM BUCKLEY: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, and Members of the Committee. My name is Tom Buckley. I represent SBC.

I'm an external affairs manager from northwest Connecticut and I'm here to speak on behalf of the after school bill, Raised House Bill 6802.

I'm proud to say I'm a member of the statewide after school committee that's been established by Public Act 03-206.

I've also been fortunate enough to participate in a few national meetings that are coordinated through the Mott foundation, who has given a grant to Connecticut along with 24 other states to establish a statewide advisory network, statewide after school network.

I'm proud of SBC Connecticut's role when it comes to support of after school programs. We've sponsored or provided grants for programs such as gear up, which is a national program for urban environments, the YMCA and a lot of other organizations that promote quality out of school or after school efforts.

I applaud the efforts of the Legislature for last year's effort to fund some of the after school programs through a pilot project.

This bill itself contains important goals for statewide efforts to provide quality out of school activities and continues the good work that was started last year.

As a business community member I thought it was important that you do hear from us, that we do value after school programs.

Out of school is very important for the State of Connecticut, and I'd encourage you to consider House Bill 6802 and continue the great work that's already been started in the State of Connecticut. Thank you for your time.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Let me just say, from the perspective of my town, thank you very much to your company. Of all the companies in Connecticut, SBC particularly in the last four or five years has really stepped up to the plate to help on these types of programs.

I've seen it in my own time, the boys and girls club, they've helped out there. We have a beat the street boxing club that has about 70 kids in it right now that are not in the street in their idle time.

They're learning how to box, and it's a wonderful program. You guys have been supportive of that.

As a matter of fact, you're sponsoring that match tomorrow at Wolcott Technical High School.

I just want to thank you because I notice more and more SBC is getting involved in helping out these after school programs.

TOM BUCKLEY: We appreciate that.

SEN. GAFFEY: Okay. Thank you very much. Michelle Anderson.

MICHELLE ANDERSON: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, and Members of the Education Committee [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 2B to Tape 3A.]

Consists of 62 state-funded family resource centers. Today we are speaking on House Bill 6680. That's the act implementing the Governor's budget recommendations. We are in favor of Sections One and Two of this bill.

We are in favor of the creation of the Early Childhood Investment Advisory Cabinet. We feel it would add a presence to early childhood in our state.

We would recommend involving as many stakeholders as possible to this cabinet. We are also involved in the creation of the statewide early childhood pilot program.

We feel that this program would be a creative way to put out funding there for different early childhood initiatives.

We would add that it could also be used to help create more slots for families. The Connecticut Family Resource Alliance favors the conditions of this pilot program.

As mentioned before, quality is definitely key, and we would support quality in reimbursement also for childcare providers to obtain quality certifications such as associate's degrees.

We encourage the use of preschool curriculum framework and benchmarks from SDE. The Alliance also supports the idea providing all parents of newborn children with information on early childhood development.

The FRC model does exactly this. Our families in training model also known as our parents as teachers program provides support services to newborns that resource and referral, weekly playgroups, workshops and home visitation.

When the state looks at this bill, we hope the state will look to Family Resource Center's existing comprehensive model as a resource when adopting this idea of providing information to families with newborns.

We are pleased this bill was raised in this Committee. Our state has had numerous early childhood successes such as Head Start, school readiness, Family Resource Center's 211-child-info line and many other state and local programs.

We urge this Committee to use the existing programs as models or a vehicle for implementation rather than recreating new initiatives. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Michelle. Any questions? Thank you very much. Judy Hjorth.

JUDY HJORTH: My name is Judy Hjorth. That is why they have problems, for those of you who don't know that.

I'm a retired ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, and I'm a member on the Committee of Taxation Reform for the Greater Hartford Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice.

Most of us who are on that committee on taxation reform are there because we see this as a primary way of helping education. I live in the Town of Vernon.

We are grateful for the objectives of Senate Bill 1213. I am grateful that responsible adults are committed to providing quality education for every child and not just the chosen few who live in select towns.

A primary way that children know of our love, support and care is when we commit ourselves to quality education on their behalf.

It takes more than words to provide quality education for all the children in Connecticut.

It will take serious, concrete action and serious increased funding now. The pie clearly needs to be bigger.

I'm also grateful that the proposal does not depend on property taxes for funding, but increases the progressive income tax rates. In Vernon it took four referendums in 2004 to pass the town budget.

We were not alone. It also took four referendums and Tolland, Bolton, Coventry, Ellington and other nearby towns got away with just three.

Because of my commitment to quality public education I did vote yes for each of the referendums even though it will mean my property taxes will go up when my income has gone down due to my retirement.

I sympathize with the many people who voted no on the town budgets because they cannot afford the additional property taxes no matter how much they're committed to public education or municipal services.

Currently, Connecticut pins too much on property taxes to fund public education. The problem of adequate funding cannot be resolved town by town.

It must be resolved by the collective wisdom and initiative of Legislators. I ask though that you go further than is proposed in this bill by increasing the tax rate of family incomes in excess of $250,000.

A progressive income tax is a just tax. When our incomes go up, so do our taxes, and when our incomes go down, so should our taxes.

A progressive income tax provides a more just, equitable and stable base to fund quality education for all Connecticut children. That pie does need to be larger. We all have been given gifts.

Some have been given more than others in either personal attributes or material resources or both. Scripture tells us that we are to use our gifts for the common good of all.

For everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required. From the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be abandoned.

The State of Connecticut is a truly, truly gifted state when we look at the whole picture.

I challenge you to take significant action for all the people of Connecticut to use justly the gifts we have to love, support and care for all our children.

By raising taxes on family incomes in excess of $250,000 and following the graded tax structure that Connecticut proposed and we support, its economic security act would raise $500 million.

While that is still one half of what the Blue Ribbon Commission said is needed for education in Connecticut, it still would make a true difference.

Thank you for your time and for your listening. I hope you can act. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much. We will be acting. Ultimately there will be a vote, and people will have to decide where they come down on this issue.

Everybody ran on more funding for education, but when it comes to the question of how do you pay for it, some may be hesitant in terms of how they approach--

JUDY HJORTH: One of the things you may be interested in is that we are circulating a petition. We just started doing it.

Just a few weeks, from very few congregations we have 1,000 signatures. The response to this kind of proposal and this kind of tax surprised us by how positive it has been.

I think there may be more support than people may realize.

SEN. GAFFEY: --keep up the hard work. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. David Davison, American Savings Foundation.

DAVID DAVISON: Thank you Senator Gaffey, Members of the Committee for the opportunity to speak today in favor of Raised House Bill 6802.

My name is David Davison, and I'm president and CEO of the American Savings Bank Foundation. We are a private, independent, charitable foundation serving an area comprised of 64 towns in Connecticut.

We do this by issuing grants to community organizations and by awarding college scholarships.

This year alone, we will provide approximately $3.3 million in total funding, with the majority going towards direct services for children, youth and families.

Over the years we have been very heavily invested in after school programs, especially in high-need communities like New Britain.

National research and our own local experience as a funder tells us that local after school programs work on many levels, helping individual children, providing support for families and strengthening communities.

In New Britain, where the dropout rate and teen pregnancy rate are both very serious problems, only 22% of middle school students are regularly attending after school programs. Access to programs is a major issue--

SEN. GAFFEY: Where'd you cite the 22% from? I'll give you the balance of your time, but the 22%, where'd you cite that from?

DAVID DAVISON: --we actually did our own research. We got help. We actually commissioned a study.

Connecticut Voices for Children helped us with it. We looked at what's going on in New Britain, in that community, did the survey and that's what we found.

SEN. GAFFEY: Okay. So in New Britain, 22%.

DAVID DAVISON: Yes. We have seen other data that suggests that's pretty typical. I can't give you the citation, but I have seen other data. It's pretty representative.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thanks. Roll the clock back, guys, could you?

DAVID DAVISON: Thank you. I hope to get in under time. In any case, access is a big issue, so is program quality.

Because of inadequate resources many organizations cannot provide the high-quality programs children need and deserve.

In a few weeks, the American Savings Foundation will formally announce a new funding initiative in our home city of New Britain with the goal of expanding and improving after school programs, primarily for disadvantaged youth.

Our initiative will help youth development programs to collaborate in order to use available resources more effectively to serve children.

At the same time, we want to find committed funding partners, including the State of Connecticut, to work with us long-term on these goals.

I was very happy to note that the proposed bill specifically encourages public-private partnerships. Frankly, private philanthropy cannot supplant government support on a broad basis.

I mention that because many organizations come to us and say can you make up to us for our lost government funding. That's something that's impossible for a private philanthropy to really do.

An initiative like ours would be far more effective if it works in conjunction with increased state funding.

This proposed legislation will stimulate private and corporate funders to do more in this important and evolving area of youth development programming.

This is not just a matter of money. Collaboration by both funders and providers on a large scale means a sharing of knowledge and experience that produces measurable positive outcomes.

After school programs should not be a luxury that only some children can afford. The American Savings Foundation is going to invest more in this area of youth development, and we hope the state will increase its commitment to this effort as well. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: I appreciate your testimony. Any questions for David? Thank you very much. Rose Murphy. Rose, you're going to give us those statistics I asked for right? You've got a great last name, Rose. I'm Irish.

ROSE MURPHY: Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee. My name is Rose Murphy and I'm a senior research analyst for Unite Here.

I work with GESO, the graduate teachers' union at Yale. Many of you have seen Tuesday's New York Times article revealing that the faculty of Ivy League universities has not changed much over the last ten years.

Black professors comprise only 2% of the tenured faculty in 2003, just like in 1993. Hispanic professors comprised 1%, that's 1% of tenured faculty in 2003, just like in 1993.

In 2003 the eight Ivy League schools hired a total of 433 new tenure-track faculty. Of these, only 14 were black professors and only 8 were Hispanic professors.

I've included with my testimony the New York Times article and the report that has a lot of this data in it.

If we know all this, then why should Connecticut mandate that data about racial and gender diversity of the faculty be made available?

The U.S. Department of Education does in fact collect the demographics about universities and students in IPEDS, the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System.

As a result, colleges and universities already have the data collection mechanisms in place, which will hopefully mean it won't cost them very much more to make this data available for students to understand.

There are however several problems with the disclosed data. The first is that the data is often incomplete and doesn't tell what field the faculty is in.

For example, if you're a high school student, a young woman studying math and you want to know if there are any women on the math faculty, that's not the kind of data that's included.

It's only the overall numbers for the schools. The second problem is that IPEDS only collects detailed data on full-time faculty.

Many colleges and universities use part-time professors or adjuncts to teach some of the most intensive classes such as writing, foreign language and science laboratories.

Unfortunately, these are the places where women and people of color have been able to find the only jobs available in the universities.

These jobs do not have job security, and often aren't given the resources needed to mentor students. The final problem is that the data is stored in a database designed for a policy analyst.

Someone like me, with a graduate degree, can spend months plowing through the data and finally make it presentable and comprehensible to the average person.

Your average high school student will be totally lost. They cannot figure out what the faculty looks like at the college they're considering applying to.

The bill before you will provide timely, complete data sent directly to the students who have a right to know who will be teaching them. This will help college applicants make informed decisions about where to go to college.

A female student might want to make sure that the college has hired female scientists to mentor her through her studies.

An African American student might want to make sure that the black faculty in the [inaudible] are not all in part-time appointments turning over every year and not being able to provide mentorship over the four years they're there.

When this information becomes disclosed by statute then students will be able to make these choices based on truth, not on glossy brochures.

If this means that a university has to change its practices in order to continue attracting the best and brightest women and minority students then this law will have served its purpose.

Thank you for your time, and I urge you to support House Bill 6823.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Rose. Questions for Rose? Mainly what we want to do, what you'd like to do is to have the universities disaggregate the data that they supply to the federal Department of Education by subject matter, by the subject they teach? Is that it, or is there more?

ROSE MURPHY: Yes. We'd also like to know more about the part-time and adjunct faculty. I would say a lot of students, and I certainly didn't know this when I went to college, don't know that there are a lot of faculty that they'll see who won't be there after their one semester.

They'll disappear after a year or a single semester, so that might up the student to teacher ratio, or rather increase the faculty to student ratio.

That actually doesn't provide the long-term mentorship that students expect in their four years of college.

SEN. GAFFEY: Yes, it sort of skews it artificially for a year or so. Okay. Well, I thank you very much for waiting to testify today.

ROSE MURPHY: Absolutely. If you have any questions about the data I'm happy to answer.

SEN. GAFFEY: On this one we'll probably need to bring back a working group, so I'm sure Representative Fleischmann knows how to get a hold of you all.

I might need a few representatives to come and sit at the table with us.

ROSE MURPHY: Absolutely. I'm available for whatever you need.

SEN. GAFFEY: All right, thank you very much.

TRACEY LAY: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, and Members of the Committee. My name's Tracey Lay, and I'm speaking in support of Raised House Bill 6802, AN ACT CONCERNING A CONNECTICUT OUT OF SCHOOL TIME GRANT.

I am currently the president of CSACA, which is the Connecticut School-Age Care Alliance. CSACA is Connecticut's after school professional organization.

Our mission is to provide leadership, education and advocacy for excellence in after school programs for children and youth ages 5 through 15.

CSACA is a nonprofit organization led by a volunteer board of governors that provides educational opportunities and support to over 1,200 members who are after school providers throughout the State of Connecticut.

Benefits include bi-annual statewide conferences, regional workshops, a resource library, a quarterly newsletter and access to the national organization, as we are the affiliate of the National After School Association.

I'm also the director of school-age programs and development services at Education Connection, which is one of the six regional education service centers in Connecticut.

I'm responsible for before and after school programs in seven school districts that operate throughout western Connecticut in elementary and middle schools.

We also provide professional development opportunities and consulting services to other agencies and school districts.

Representing both Education Connection and CSACA for the past 11 years, I've been actively working with other partners in the field of out of school time.

I've been involved in the Connecticut After School Alliance, which is facilitated by the Connecticut Commission on Children since its inception at the Disney Institute in July of 2002.

This was an invitational summit provided by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education and the National After School Alliance to teams from seven states, including Connecticut.

Since then, dedicated people from across the state representing all kinds of after school programs including academics, the arts, childcare, enrichment, recreational and others have been brought together, all with the common goal to enhance after school programs throughout Connecticut.

This group has also worked very closely with Representative Betty Boukus on crafting the concept of this bill language.

The After School Advisory Council has also been formed for the State Department of Education, in partnership with the State Department of Social Services and the Commission on Children along with other state agencies and stakeholders to work as the advisory group to the Connecticut After School Network, which CSACA is actually the intermediary for.

Connecticut continues to move forward in the field of after school, but we need your support.

Many communities in Connecticut, both urban and rural, are in dire need for quality after school programs.

In my various professional roles and as a parent of two children I have first hand experience of the positive results after school programs can have on children and youth.

I've also seen firsthand what the research shows. After school programs can enhance the overall well being of our children emotionally, physically, socially and academically.

In addition to student success there are numerous other benefits of after school programs.

Quality after school programs provide support to schools, communities and especially to our families in Connecticut.

On behalf of CSACA and Education Connection I wholeheartedly support these efforts and appreciate your continued support for quality after school programs for youth in Connecticut.

Right on the buzzer. Thank you for the opportunity.

SEN. GAFFEY: You get a prize for that. That's great. Thank you very much for your testimony. Any questions? Thank you. Beth Mohan? Is Beth here? How about Bob Zarnetske?

BOB ZARNETSKE: Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee. I'm Bob Zarnetske, assistant city manager in the City of Norwich.

We believe in the power of safety and teamwork, so we try to go everywhere as a team. I'll defer to Representative Olson.

REP. OLSON: If I may, Senator Gaffey, Representative Reinoso, and distinguished Members of the Education Committee.

We are here today certainly to discuss the idea of increased funding for ECS and special education.

The City of Norwich just recently received a designation as a priority school district, which means that we will be receiving additional funding on a yearly basis for certain programs and that sort of thing in the City of Norwich.

The reason I bring that up is it's a double-edged sword. Basically, what is acknowledged now by the State Department of Education is that Norwich is suffering some significant impacts.

Impacts have recently come to our community after we have seen some changes in our social structure, changes just in our community as a result of the casinos coming to our region.

We are seeing over 30 different languages being spoken in the Norwich public schools. That is certainly having an impact on our ability to provide education and really to provide services, English as a second language services as well as special needs.

The funding that we received is imperative because of the changing needs of our schools.

I ask that you give particular consideration to proposals that will increase funding based on these needs.

I know that our assistant city manager as well as our Chairman of the Board of Education, John LeVangie would like to speak.

SEN. GAFFEY: All within three minutes. You snuck in there.

JOHN LEVANGIE: Good afternoon distinguished Legislators. First, I'd like to say my name's John LeVangie, Chairman of the Board of Education in Norwich.

I'd just like to say thank you for your designation that Norwich become a priority school district.

We would also be looking forward to any consideration of anything you could give us in the future, thank you.

BOB ZARNETSKE: I'll just close with a little story here. I just want to leave you with something light.

Pequot, Mohegan and Narragansett lore in our part of the state includes a story about the Machimoodus, the place of little noises.

When I was a kid I was told that the moodus noises, as the English came to call them, were caused by the seismic stresses and the shifting subterranean mica stone in the area.

Since Indian gaming has become a prominent part of our economy in southeastern Connecticut, there are new stresses and new dynamics at place.

There are new noises. One of the new noises is 32 languages being spoken in the public schools in our part of the state.

This noise has a name too, and we call it opportunity. We need the state to help us realize the potential of that opportunity. With that, I thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Good job. Representative Mikutel, who attends every hearing and every meeting, so whenever he wants to ask a question he gets to ask a question.

REP. MIKUTEL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know you bring to this Committee and this Assembly a rather unique concept, again, relating to casino impacts.

The fact that the casinos are bringing in so many new employees, many of these new employees bring children who are entering the school system who need to be taught English.

This is the growing burden in the area. It's not just applicable to Norwich. I can tell you that in the communities around Norwich, which are not priority, school districts and which do not receive casino impact aid also are suffering the same situation.

I know in particular, the towns of Griswold, Plainfield and Windham also are having students.

I know in the small Town of Griswold, the population of 12,000 is teaching 15 different languages in that school system.

These unique impacts of the casino are borne, the brunt of those impacts are not being fairly distributed.

There are certain communities out there, such as Norwich, and more urban areas that have affordable housing that are the ones who are being uniquely impacted.

This bill addresses that, Mr. Chairman. I thank you for educating Members of this Committee and the Legislature about that new and unique impact.

REP. OLSON: Thank you so much, Representative Mikutel. I appreciate you bringing up the region.

In my haste to speak as quickly as possible, you were more eloquent in demonstrating really the impact we have throughout the region in southeastern Connecticut as a result of our new residents and our new direction.

I appreciate that very much. Certainly, Representative Reynolds has some of the same impacts being from Preston and Ledyard. Thank you so much for bringing that up.

REP. REINOSO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. When you make reference to the 32 different languages I'm assuming that most of the kids are receiving ESL services?

JOHN LEVANGIE: Yes, that would be the case. The three major languages in Norwich are Spanish, Asian Creole and Chinese. They account for the lion's share of the number.

REP. REINOSO: Okay. And in addition to those services they're also receiving, some of them, special education that is different from ESL I'm assuming.

JOHN LEVANGIE: Yes, we have some that are also receiving special education services. I might also add that about 29.7% of the students in Norwich have at least one or both parents working at either Foxwood's or Mohegan's site.

SEN. GAFFEY: Patrice Konesh, representing the Mashantuckets. Good, now we can get a bit of an education I presume.

PATRICE KONESH: Good afternoon, I'm Patrice Konesh. I'm in-house counsel to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe.

I've been working on a legal solution with the superintendent of Ledyard schools who you heard earlier today, and with the Attorney General and others.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of the proposed legislation, which is Raised Senate Bill 1212.

If enacted, it will have the dual benefit of clarifying the financial obligations of school districts which provide special education services to tribal children and recognizing the Tribe's Department of Children and Protective Services.

It will also recognize its authority to place children in the most appropriate placement for the child that meets his or her special needs.

The Tribe supports enactment of this legislation. I'd like to offer some background about the Tribe's Protective Services in situations, which would be impacted by this legislation.

CPS was formerly established by the Tribe's Child Protection and Family Preservation law, and was charged with the responsibility for receiving reports of children in need of the Tribe's care and protection.

They also investigate reports of child abuse and neglect, and ensured that protected services and related assistance is provided to children and families.

In this capacity, the Tribe's CPS operates substantially similarly to the state's Department of Children and Families. We have a very good cooperative relationship in those situations.

Ledyard provides regular and special education services to tribal children who live on or near the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation.

In the unfortunate situation where it becomes necessary to remove a child from his or her home, CPS attempts to place a child within the tribal community and to allow the child to attend the same school.

If the child needs additional services and special care such as a therapeutic foster home and such care and services are not available within the tribal community, CPS will find an appropriate placement for that child.

Oftentimes it is outside the tribal community. In these cases the Tribe has contracted with Klineberg Family Center and Waterford Country School to provide qualified therapeutic homes and services.

Under the state's special education laws DCF removes a child who receives special education services from a home and places a child in a home outside the school district.

The receiving school is obligated to provide and financially support the continued educational services to that child.

The sending school no longer has any financial obligation for that child's education.

This is because DCF is a public agency, a state-created agency authorized to place children in foster homes and other placements.

If the Tribe's CPS makes such a placement, the sending school is still obligated to financially support that child's special education services.

This, of course, is because CPS is not a public agency as has been defined and used in the Connecticut General Statutes.

This means that if a child who attends Ledyard schools and receives special education is removed from CPS from a home on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation and is placed in a foster home outside the Ledyard school district.

Ledyard will continue to be responsible for expenses related to that child's special education in the new school up to $45,000, which is five times per pupil cost.

If DCF made such a placement, the school district would be responsible for only up to $9,000.

In summary, we support the legislation because it would assist the town in understanding its financial obligations and responsibilities.

It would clarify the sending school and receiving school's responsibility regarding educational services.

It would recognize the Child Protective Services Department as an agency that has authority over child welfare matters and is integral to the operation with DCF as well. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: So is it within IDEA where the town is obligated to provide the special education services for the child from a sovereign nation?

PATRICE KONESH: It is federal law. Under the federal Johnson-O'Malley Act, which has been in place for several decades now the children from Indian reservations are titled to education from school districts in which the reservation is geographically located.

Johnson-O'Malley, that was an earlier federal statute, much earlier in the 1800s. The Johnson-O'Malley Act provides for reimbursement to those towns for educating those children.

The federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs reimburses the town for educating children because it's a federal reservation, much like a military reservation for example.

Ledyard receives about $3,500 per pupil per year, and that is an additional sum, a higher amount of money, when there are special education services involved.

SEN. GAFFEY: So the base is $3,500 per kid from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and then once they have special needs that base increases?

PATRICE KONESH: There is an increase, yes.

SEN. GAFFEY: Does that also come from the Bureau of Indian Affairs?

PATRICE KONESH: Yes, this is all federal money. I believe the town also receives additional support from other funds. In any event, it's substantially federal funds.

SEN. GAFFEY: Okay. Thank you.

REP. REYNOLDS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your testimony, and thank you for waiting. Could you clarify, the Tribe did not have to form a Child Protective Services Office correct? That was done voluntarily?

PATRICE KONESH: Yes, it was.

REP. REYNOLDS: Tomorrow you could decide to close that office. What would happen to the children that were placed by the Tribe? Whose responsibility would they then fall under?

PATRICE KONESH: If the tribe were to disestablish its Child Protective Services, I believe the state's Department of Children and Family Services would take over the placement, the investigation of suspected reports of abuse and neglect.

They'd also take over placement and provision of services to those children.

REP. REYNOLDS: In essence, you are saving the state money by assuming the obligation of managing that caseload and recommending and making the placements?

PATRICE KONESH: Yes, that's very accurate. Oftentimes when a child who is a member of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe comes to the attention of DCF, it could be in Bridgeport or New Haven or Norwich or some other town.

DCF will often call the Tribe's Child Protective Services immediately and transfer jurisdiction to the tribal court, so they do not need to become involved in the adjudication of services of that matter.

REP. REYNOLDS: The Chairman asked a very good question about the statutory obligation of local school districts to provide these services, and why the Tribe doesn't provide them.

In answering that question I think you answered it adequately. You referred to the federal funding received by the district.

That is an acknowledgement, I assume, of the tax-exempt nature of the Reservation, an acknowledgement that the homes on the Reservation from which many of those children come don't pay property taxes.

Therefore, the federal government wanted to at least partially compensate for the speaking of the grant list that resulted, and for the loss of revenue that would have normally provided for the education of those children. Is that correct?

PATRICE KONESH: That is absolutely correct. The Reservation is federal trust land, land that's held in trust by the federal government and therefore is not subject to the local property tax.

Recognizing that local schools that do educate children are incurring expenses, federal law provides reimbursement or impact aid to the local schools.

It's not 100%, but it's a substantial amount.

REP. REYNOLDS: Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Questions further for Attorney Konesh? Thank you very much for your time. Carol Shoemaker. Hi, Carol.

CAROL SHOEMAKER: Good afternoon, Chairmen Gaffey and Fleischmann. I'm just a little nervous. My name is Carol Shoemaker, and I am here to testify on behalf of the Greater Hartford Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice.

I co-chair the Education Taskforce of that Coalition. The Coalition represents 42 communities in the Hartford region, representing about 20,000 individuals.

The Coalition is committed to focusing its efforts on systemic inequities in our public institutions and advocating for change where we perceive a racial and economic injustice.

Racial and economic disparities show up in our public education system in the third grade mastery test scores as an achievement gap of nearly 30% to 40% difference between low-income children in our urban communities and wealthier suburban children.

The origins of this gap can be traced to inequitable access to preschool programs. National and state research shows conclusively that access to quality preschool programs for three-and-four-year-old children improves their academic success across racial and economic groups.

Access to preschool essentially levels the playing fields. Connecticut made a good start by enacting school readiness legislation in 1997.

Regrettably, the Legislature has not fallowed through with that commitment. Based on a current SDE report, there are currently more than 9,100 three-and-four-year olds eligible for school readiness programs, but not currently being served in the 18 priority school districts.

ICEJ supports Governor Rell's new education initiatives, as proposed in House Bill 6680 with the following exceptions. First, we do not support the early childhood pilot program as suggested in Section Two.

We don't need a new program, and we certainly don't need a pilot. We have a school readiness program that works.

Furthermore, there is a two-year allocation of $11 million to put 1,000 more children in school readiness programs over that two-year period.

We feel that that proposal is much too modest. The state needs to commit to an aggressive plan to eliminate the achievement gap.

We therefore appeal to this Committee and all of the State Legislators to support the alternative school readiness initiatives that were put forward earlier from the State Department of Education Office and the State Commissioner.

Their proposal would add 3,800 more children to school readiness programs over the next two years in these priority school districts.

ICEJ believes also that the Early Childhood Advisory Cabinet proposed in Section One needs community representation at that table.

We believe that when policy is formulated, those who will be directly affected by those decisions need to be at the table. We suggest three additional seats at that table.

One for a parent advisory group, it is after all their children who are being served by those programs.

Another seat ought to be created for early education providers, those who work directly with the children in preschool programs.

The third seat should be reserved for an advocacy group outside of the policy makers who are responsible for our current system.

I feel, and the Coalition feels that we're at a crossroads. We have an opportunity with House Bill 6680 to move towards a comprehensive investment in early education.

ICEJ urges you to make that investment in this legislative session. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much, Carol, you did great. Question from Chairman Fleischmann.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Carol, thank you very much for your testimony and for your hard work on this issue. I haven't gotten to see the written version.

I imagine you submitted it and it's in my stack. It would be hard to fight your way through this in three minutes.

I'm just wondering, did you or others from ICEJ include with your testimony any proposed language for recasting the early childhood initiative to make it fit better with existing school readiness statutes?

CAROL SHOEMAKER: We have not, but we would certainly be willing to work on that.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Okay. It is something that I'm already working on some. I know you've got a lot of committed, bright, talented people working at ICEJ.

If folks have specific ideas regarding drafting and ways to make sure we're relying on programs we've already got operating well, I'm very open to suggestions.

CAROL SHOEMAKER: Good, we'd be happy to forward them to you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: I agree with your testimony. The nice thing about the school readiness program when we wrote it is it's a grassroots-up approach rather than the state on down.

CAROL SHOEMAKER: It is, and it has all the components. It's not just the educational component, but all the services that kids need.

SEN. GAFFEY: Right. Okay. Any questions? Thank you very much. Joan Cooney.

JOAN COONEY: Is that my handwriting you're struggling with?

SEN. GAFFEY: It's probably my eyes. It's been a long day. My children get up at 5, so three different schools on Friday I go to. It's a long day. Go ahead.

JOAN COONEY: Sorry about that. Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann, and other Members of the Education Committee, my name is Joan Cooney.

I'm speaking to House Bill 6680. I also represent the Greater Hartford Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice, where I am a member of the Education Task Force.

My concern today is with the inadequacy of the Governor's proposals as they relate to early childhood education.

We on the taskforce support the proposal of the State Department of Education for the funding of 3,800 additional preschool slots in priority school districts over the next two years.

The Governor's proposal would fund only 1,000 new slots in that period of time. I would like to speak from my own personal experience in education.

I'm a retired high school mathematics teacher. For four years after I retired, I volunteered in after school programs working with high-risk students, first at Weaver then at Hartford Public High School.

I started with seniors whose skills were, so weak that there often seemed to be no hope of their passing in time for graduation.

Then I worked with ninth graders in the hope that getting to them at an earlier stage would increase their chances for success.

Here, too, I found that my students were so far behind that I was teaching them necessary skills that they should have mastered in elementary school.

I often felt that there was little likelihood of passing the course they were taking.

Many of these students, although quite capable, seemed to be deeply entrenched in the habit of failure that they just seemed to accept.

This revealed itself in the lack of commitment to the help that was being offered by the program, as well as commitment to doing their homework and in their poor school attendance.

My energy now goes back all the way back to age three to provide quality education in order to start these students off with the experience of success.

We cannot afford to have our children experiencing failure at the beginning of their school experience only to have that snowball into the failures we are seeing in high school.

My main concern is with closing the achievement gap, and giving underserved children in the priority districts an equal chance of success.

I felt that I would have to have worked full time one on one with some of my high school students to bring them on a level where they could pass algebra.

My little three-year-old granddaughter, like most kids her age, is like a little sponge. It's mind boggling how rapidly she acquires and retains new knowledge.

We must get to these children early. What a horrendous price we pay in allowing this precious resource, this amazing young mind fall through the cracks.

What possible excuse can we give to these children that would be good enough? I know that you must always be looking at the bottom line.

The abundant research that is available to us on early childhood education points out not only a strong impact on school success, but also its abundant fiscal returns.

Yes, the initial investment is difficult to make, but I believe if we are serious about closing the huge achievement gap that exists in our education system we must have the courage to take a plunge.

Please support the State Department of Education's proposal on early [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 3A to Tape 3B.]

SEN. GAFFEY: Through a few different meetings together. This is the first time you've shared personal experiences you've had that brought you to all this work on early childhood education.

I appreciate you sharing that. What grades did you teach?

JOAN COONEY: I taught grades nine through twelve.

SEN. GAFFEY: God bless you. My daughter is 15, in ninth grade. It's a whole new world, I'll tell you. Representative Boucher.

REP. BOUCHER: Thank you, Chairman. Thank you also for your very compelling testimony. I have also unfortunately in my own district had adults that have been hired as teachers in the past by Hartford businesses to teach high school graduates that they get as employees the basics, writing, math, etc.

Obviously from your testimony you found the same thing. Could you articulate something very briefly if you could?

If we were to be so successful at the early ages, what might there be as a danger point, an impediment once they enter in to the actual school system? It obviously produced a very flawed product at the end of the day.

JOAN COONEY: What would be the danger point?

REP. BOUCHER: Yes, what would be some of the impediments that you could see that we may need to address? Maybe once they get to be five and they enter into that school system?

JOAN COONEY: Once they start the school system if they have not had preschool skills that were taught to them there are certain laid out skills that are important for them to receive before they enter kindergarten.

If they have not received that, they're in danger already. They will start kindergarten and begin to experience failure right off the bat.

My experience with working with Hartford High School students shows that they have gotten into the habit of ailing.

I believe that probably stemmed from a very early age where they felt hopeless, whatever the attitude would be. I'm going to fail, so whatever. That's a tragic thing that I believe is quite preventable.

REP. BOUCHER: The reason I ask that question, is a lot of times we find that kids can actually do very well up to the fourth grade.

Something seems to happen in fourth grade, from that point on, that really causes that cycle of failure that you're talking about. I was just wondering whether you'd had any experience with that or not.

JOAN COONEY: I have not had experience with that particular age, no.

SEN. GAFFEY: The one thing I'd be concerned about is we have two great school readiness programs in my district, one in Meriden--

JOAN COONEY: I'm sorry, two great school?

SEN. GAFFEY: -School readiness programs. Preschool programs. Meriden and Middletown. I get really concerned about going from the full-day school readiness preschool program to a kindergarten that's half day.

We've got to follow that up because that's a major disconnect. Thank you very much for your testimony. I really appreciate you taking the time.

We've got a great showing from West Hartford today, it's terrific. We have Sue Tenorio.

SUE TENORIO: Excuse me, I've been asked if I could share my time. My name is Dr. Sue Tenorio, and I'm an administrator with the Danbury public school system. You are?

JANICE GRENDEL: I'm Janice Grendel, and I would love an opportunity to speak with you, even for a minute and a half. Thank you very much.

SUE TENORIO: You're welcome. I am an administrator of school readiness, school-age childcare, after school programs in Danbury schools and also family resource centers.

It's interesting to hear that the larger issue seems to be childcare. I'm specifically here to speak in support of House Bill 6802.

To backtrack a bit, in many communities for many years after school programs and activities have always existed, cobbling together a number of resources.

In 1998 the U.S. Department of Education awarded to Danbury, Hartford and Waterbury the first of 21^st Century Community Learning Center Grants.

From the 3 communities, and that was 3 of 99 across the country, the grants themselves grew to 14 communities in Connecticut.

They were only three-year funding. Even when we received the richest of these grants, containing many of the points that are in House Bill 6802, it still was never enough money.

The needs of each of the communities always exceeded the demands. Now we find ourselves in a position where the federal monies are gone.

The state monies that come to SDE would never equate with the federal dollars. We have the continued needs of our children and families. There's no question that we need the services.

We need the programs. Some of the communities, like Danbury in 2001 initiated a community-wide alliance comprised of providers.

Our mayor is the honorary chair. We have parents and interested people in promoting and sustaining after school programs.

More to the point, immediately this past year Danbury as well as Bridgeport, Norwalk and Stamford participate in a regional effort to develop strategic plans and efforts towards promoting and sustaining after school programs.

This is really what's being promoted in House Bill 6802. Obviously, it's a reality that needs to be continued, these cooperative efforts. I'd like to step aside at this point.

JANICE GRENDEL: I'm number 37. I can come back. But I would like to come back, if there's any chance of that.

SEN. GAFFEY: You're welcome to come back. You're just a couple away. In fairness, the people that are next on the list--

JANICE GRENDEL: I absolutely understand.

SEN. GAFFEY: --I like to follow the rules. Janice, I know you're here representing your Governor's recommendations, however the rules are very specific as to who I can take in the first hour.

Thank you very much. Questions for Sue? Thank you very much.

DAVID WASCH: Good afternoon, and I guess almost evening at this point. My name is David Wasch, and I'm here representing the Local Initiative Support Corporation, or LISC.

I'm also director of the Children's Investment Partnership, or CIP, which is a statewide childcare facilities program. I'm also a member of the Early Childhood Alliance.

I'd like to thank Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann, as well as the other Members here for the opportunity to testify before the Committee in support of House Bill 6680, AN ACT IMPLEMENTING THE GOEVRNOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS CONCERNING EDUCATION.

What CIP does, is we provide a combination of training, technical assistance and flexible, affordable financing for products ranging from minor renovations to the construction of new, quality facilities.

In my two years as director of CIP, I've provided assistance to nearly 70 early education providers to help them develop quality spaces where children can learn and grow.

There's overwhelming evidence that three-and-four-year-old children, low income and at-risk children in particular need high quality early education for their healthy development, as well as their future success.

Children receiving a quality early education are more likely to succeed in school. They're less likely to repeat grades or require remedial help.

Connecticut established itself as a national leader in early education with the enactment of the school readiness legislation in 1997.

In 2000, the State Department of Education and Department of Social Services estimated the need for 15,000 additional spaces for children in nearly 50 priority, transitional and severe needs school districts.

In 2004 this Legislature voted to expand the school readiness program. Governor Rell's proposed budget takes further steps to address the need for standard access to early education, and sets Connecticut on the path for ensuring that every child enters kindergarten healthy, eager to learn and ready for school success.

Specifically, House Bill 6680 establishes an early childhood investment advisory cabinet, which will help coordinate the efforts of the various agencies engaged in early education.

It will also align the resources in areas such as teacher education, parent involvement and facilities development.

The Governor's proposed budget builds on the success of Connecticut's school readiness legislation and takes steps towards a more comprehensive system of care and education. That's about it.

I'd like to thank you for your time and offer my services, LISC's, Children's Investment Partnership to help you with your needs in terms of facilities and facilities expansion.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, David. It's good to now know your face as well as your voice, as we've been on the phone the last couple of weeks.

Thank you for your assistance to the preschool program in my district, reaching out for the need and continuing to. Any questions for David? Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Anwar Ahmad.

ANWAR AHMAD: Good afternoon, Chairman Gaffey, Chairman Fleischmann, and other Members of the Education Committee.

My name is Anwar Ahmad. I'm the branch services manager for the Hartford Public Library.

I am here representing Louise Blalock, the chief librarian of the Hartford Public Library.

Ms. Blalock very much wanted to be here in person but was unable to attend today's hearing.

I'm here today to speak in support of House Bill 6802, AN ACT CONCERNING A CONNECTICUT OUT OF SCHOOL TIME GRANT. I would like to begin by telling you a story.

Yolanda, not a real name, is a third grade student who was really struggling with peer and authority relationships. She was uncooperative often, yelling and hitting.

Throughout the past year, she has received constant support and encouragement for positive behavior from Nikea, the program team leader for the library's out of school time program at the Moyland School in Hartford.

Nikea and the program made a remarkable improvement in Yolanda's behavior. At a party for Nikea, Yolanda told her publicly I had a big attitude when I first came here and you helped me with that attitude.

Yolanda is not an anomaly. Out of school time programs really do make a difference in the lives of at-risk youth on behavior and attitudes, reading levels and overall school success.

The Hartford Public Library runs a 21^st Century Community Learning Center Program at the Moyland Elementary School in Hartford.

It also runs the COLT program, and out of school time program for ninth grade students from Hartford's high schools for learning through technology.

These two programs have impacted hundreds of students, teens and elementary school students, with positive results.

Getting to positive results is critical for at-risk children and teens the Hartford Public Library serves.

Youth in the Library's out of school time programs improve school attendance, class participation and class behavior. They complete their homework.

They complete the school year and get better grades. Our experience confirms the research. Out of school time programs have positive outcomes for youth.

The Library has the infrastructure to support high quality, content-rich out of school time programs that deliver results.

Our programs have been very successful when we have the funding, but it's a struggle to get the funding to get the kind of focus and sustained work needed with at-risk youth. Federal funding has been short term.

We believe that state funding for these programs will expand opportunities in cities and towns throughout the state, and keep existing programs like those at the Public Library going.

On behalf of the Hartford Public Library, thank you for your time and attention. We support House Bill 6802.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you for staying here today and testifying. It's been a long afternoon. Questions? Thank you very much. Bruce Douglas.

BRUCE DOUGLAS: Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, good to see you again, Representative Fleischmann, Members of the Education Committee.

Out of respect for you and the time I'm going to be brief and very succinct. I'm Bruce Douglas, the executive director of the Capitol Region Education Council.

We are the regional education service center that serves the Hartford area and the 34 school districts in this region.

I appear before you to speak about the Governor's proposed budget for magnet schools and open choice.

You may be aware that CREC operates the original nine magnet schools that were developed to address the Sheff case.

We serve about 3,500 students from 54 towns. Magnet schools throughout the State of Connecticut have been quite successful.

We have a long list of both urban and suburban students waiting to attend those schools.

In her proposed budget to the General Assembly, we're pleased to see the Governor proposed an increase of $5,300 to $6,250 for our magnet school tuition for each student.

She also proposed an increase in her per-pupil education grant for choice children from $2,000 to $3,000.

While the Governor's proposed budget begins to address the problem, it still leaves the magnet schools with a deficit.

Without supplemental funding this year, the Governor's proposed budget will leave the magnet schools short of what is needed to operate in 2005 and 2006.

It is proposed in the budget that the shortfall would be passed along to the participating school districts.

Of the 54 school districts who participate in our magnet schools, 75% of them currently send tuition to the schools that is in excess of their ECS.

In some cases it's ten times more than their ECS and tuition. On average it's about three times more. It's proposed that the shortfall would be passed along to the school districts.

If this shortfall were to be passed along to the school districts, in many cases many of the school districts would not be allowed to participate in the magnet schools.

In recent years, the Capitol Region Education Council has worked with the Legislature to find supplemental funding to fill the gap.

We've been successful every year. We haven't been able to construct a permanent solution.

I encourage the Education Committee to reconvene the taskforce on public intra-district magnet school funding.

This study committee on magnet school funding was appointed by the General Assembly on September 17^th, 2004 with a specific mission of providing the 2003 General Assembly with recommendations.

As you're aware, the taskforce met only twice. I believe, Senator Gaffey, your proposed strategic planning committee on school funding might be able to address this issue.

I commend you on that, and I hope that comes to fruition. Participation by students and families and districts in the magnet schools and the choice program is strictly voluntary.

No school board is required to send children to magnet schools, nor are they required to accept open-choice students.

Districts and families participate because it's the right thing to do. It's a matter of social justice.

Intra-district programs are excellent educational opportunities that benefit both the children and the school districts.

As a result of these programs, children, students and teachers are thriving in racially diverse classrooms in the Capitol region.

Thank you for your patience and your diligence this afternoon, especially your attention span.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Bruce. What is the shortfall after the Governor's additional money in her budget?

BRUCE DOUGLAS: It would be approximately $5.4 million.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, any questions? Thank you very much. I hope we can work towards closing that gap. It seems every year we have the same problem.

It affects you far more than it affects me, but it's a problem that we have to tackle, otherwise all the cards will come tumbling down.

BRUCE DOUGLAS: I'm sure working together like we have in the past will resolve it.

SEN. GAFFEY: WE have worked together pretty well. You know, I'll say that the Governor has been excellent to work with. I think that between all of us we can figure this out.

Of course, there probably has an additional revenue source somewhere to get the money for it. I've got some ideas on that too.

BRUCE DOUGLAS: Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: You're welcome. Thank you. Janice Grendel. Hello, Janice.

JANICE GRENDEL: Hello, Sir, how are you. May I approach the bench? Before you start the timer I want to bring you something.

I'm speaking on behalf of the Governor but also 3,089 friends of Connecticut's young children who have signed up to tell you that they really want us to get all children to school healthy and ready.

They would have been here themselves, but they couldn't wait this long. [inaudible] Our goal is one vote for every child in the state, that would be 40,000, and when we have 40,000 we will do this.

I will speak very briefly. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. Thank you for everyone on your side who has sat here. This is amazing.

As you know, I used to be at Connecticut Voices, and my very able co-partners, Shelly Jubal and Ellen Scalettar used to do this.

It used to amaze me that they had this sort of ability to do it. Thank you, now I understand what it takes.

SEN. GAFFEY: I feel like the judge on Miracle on 34^th Street.

JANICE GRENDEL: It is very impressive though, isn't it? What the names of 3,000 people are?

They're in your communities, and actually you can figure out which ones are in your community by looking at the list.

Actually, the Governor was the first person to sign the list. I will make this brief. I would like to take on and off three different hats.

The hat I would choose first is the hat on the behalf of the Governor, and I thank you in that regard for the opportunity to talk just for a minute about the ideas that we had behind the Early Childhood Initiative.

I think we have not communicated them very well, and it's time to do that. We're actually a lot closer to a lot of things that folks have talked about. I think the miscommunication is on our front.

To help that, I've taken the time in your testimony to give you narrative descriptions of the items in the budget, and also to give you an actual chart of what's in the budget.

You can hardly tell completely from the state's budget itself, so the last page actually breaks out all of the items for you.

That will provide lots of risk for a vibrant conversation I'm sure. The other two hats I'd like to put on before I leave, well let me just do them.

I'm a grandmom. I have four children two of whom are in Connecticut. Two of them arrive at my house at 6:00 AM every morning.

My husband thinks we're nuts and we probably are. They've been coming since they were born.

The reason is because both my daughter and son work in a place where they have to be there at six o'clock, and there is no childcare at six o'clock in the morning, at least not that charges as small an amount as we charge as grandparents.

I'm acutely personally, as a grandparent, conscious of the stressors and strains of those of us in the prime-time generation, and also on families who are trying to juggle early mornings and late nights.

It is something we would like to bring to this whole initiative. We don't see a distinction between DSS services and SDE services.

You talk about a comprehensive system that starts prenatal, if you will, and goes all the way through to those mastery tests. We deal with not just that children are born at age three and stop learning at age four.

What the community partnerships will give us is the chance to partner with communities to look at what a community says it needs to meet the school readiness needs of its children.

It may only need slots, Senator, or it may need some other things. What we're trying to do is be community-sensitive, require a plan, set some good standards for quality and accountability, and begin what we hope will build on what the School Readiness Act does.

We like to call it school readiness plus because we think that's what it is. It's not anti-community, it's not anti-slot, it just says we've got to get in bed with communities in a different kind of way.

This is a good way to start. One thing, please, about the cabinet. I want to give you an example of why I think we need it, however we end up finally configuring it.

When Secretary Genuario spoke, he talked about the challenges between magnet schools and charter schools and the ECS formula around schools.

We have the same challenge in early care and education. It's not just the state-funded centers, although they are woefully challenged.

We have school readiness at one level, state-funded center. We have Care 4 Kids, which doesn't frankly match anything else, and Head Start.

What I would hope to do when the Cabinet is established and anointed, whatever that will take. This is one of those first things that has to go to the Cabinet.

We need to work across agencies to begin to address these issues. I think we can do this a whole lot better.

The other reason for wanting the Cabinet, frankly, is not only about early care in education. It's about children's health. It's about family support and early intervention.

It's time for Connecticut to be looking birth through eight, to be looking across those systems, and frankly to honor what the National Governor's Association has said. It's not just children.

It's ready children, ready families, ready schools, ready communities and a ready state. We'd like to be a part of the reframing of that.

Lastly for me, I think, we've tried to do two things in a very limited budget context. We tried to put forth some suggestions for improving the management of what we do and what we own as a state.

We put forth a series of quality requirements. The one thing the Governor is really clear of, and she's given you lots of signals of flexibility here, quality matters.

Quality matters. Quality matters. We need to build quality, expand quality, not expand not quality. She's unequivocal on that point, and I agree with her.

The third piece of that quality-management triad is the accountability piece. The language in House Bill 6680 calls for an examination around reading, art and mathematics.

That is not what we're talking about. We probably gave the language, so we'd like to suck it back up.

We'd like to say child friendly, developmentally appropriate assessment at entry to kindergarten. We need to do that. That's the management of accountability progress.

We have to do capital expansion. People have said you have at least 8,000 kids. You don't even have space let alone quality. This starts.

We need to reach new families and old grandparents who have new children, and also other caregivers.

That's what Great Beginnings is about, and we need to partner with the pediatric community and all kinds of folks.

The public-private partnerships will allow people to do slots and do a whole lot of other things.

The other hat, and I'll end with this one and apologize for the extra minute. I spent 14 years in state government. I've sat in this chair in a whole lot of different contexts.

As I listened, I was reminded of my last job. My first job was DCF, so I carried the beeper when babies died. We need to contend with all of those issues.

My last job was as the director of health services in the Department of Corrections, an interesting place for a developmental psychologist you would probably agree.

The last observation from me is that the average reading level of our Connecticut inmates is between three and five. It's between third grade and fifth grade.

We must do this for early children because the trajectory is too predictable and too damaging.

We will not have a workforce, we will not have a citizenry, and we will not have a next generation of parents. We would like to partner with you in the next stage of this great adventure. Thank you very much.

SEN. GAFFEY: Well, let me just say that the Governor's lucky and we're lucky to have you working on this.

JANICE GRENDEL: That's just because I brought you a big roll of names.

SEN. GAFFEY: I always love hearing you speak about this because I know you're just so committed to it. I know the Governor's committed to it too.

As we deal with the issue of resources, I was glad to hear the other day the Governor sort of holding the door open as far as how else we may raise the additional resources we need to do everything we need to do.

We're not going to be able to meet all the needs, but we can meet far more needs than what we meet today.

I thank you for your testimony and for your commitment. We're probably going to have another discussion with the Ranking Members of the Committee and the staff as we develop this legislation.

We're going to ask you to come back. I might even ask the Secretary to be in the room too.

Bob, having the Chair of Appropriations, has an acute understanding of this. We can hopefully work all of this out. You make excellent points.

I didn't find much I would ever disagree with, and I thank you for the longest list that has ever been presented to me in my ten years of chairing this Committee.

JANICE GRENDEL: I would love to come back in a year with the rest of the 37,000, so I'll take that as a challenge. Thank you very much. I would love to come back.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Just a quick follow-up on that. I very much appreciate the spirit of exploration of these important new avenues to make sure we end up with a good system and flexibility.

Would I be right in understanding that when it comes to figuring out what this competitive grant looks like?

We've heard concerns from a lot of people here today and over the past few months about making sure that communities with particular need for preschool get it.

They don't have the same 70% showing up at kindergarten having had preschool that some communities in Connecticut have.

If some of the modifications include more targeting, that's something that you're open to working on?

JANICE GRENDEL: Absolutely. The Governor's intent with this was not to undo the school readiness program.

We have one of the best. Well, we started with one of the best ones. If we grow it, we'll be back among the best ones.

We need to stretch it, so that it could read other places that we've not been able to reach, understanding that you have to start someplace in the process of growing.

We would be open to conversation about a whole bunch of these things. There aren't any silver bullets in this.

We need the whole system to make it right for kids. Thank you, and thank you all for the patience that everybody has had, this is pretty amazing. Thank you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you, and if you'll hold on, Representative Boucher has a question.

REP. BOUCHER: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I must say that you are incredible impressive.

The part that I picked up on was your component that you also wanted to include other constituencies, particularly the parents.

When I had the unfortunate opportunity to visit our correctional facility for youths, interviewing the teachers that taught there on the educational component of that, the one thing they mentioned was if they could keep the kids there longer.

Imagine wanting to keep a kid incarcerated longer. They said if you can keep them instead of six months, but a year, they can actually pick up a couple of grade levels in reading.

It was about consistency in having them be there. That's the parental component that's so missing.

Having consistency and keeping the kids in a good program, so I hope you will incorporate the parental component to all you can do, even at the preschool stage.

There's an educational component there where they understand that the long-term needs of that child is also consistency in their school and their home as well.

JANICE GRENDEL: I'm with you 1000%. In fact, families are where we have to start. The state doesn't raise children. Families raise children.

Communities raise children. We have to start with parents. IT has to be a partnership. I think we'll figure out how to do that together, we've got some great models already. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Deborah.

REP. HEINRICH: One more, and thank you for staying. I've heard a lot about the public-private partnership ideas.

I've also heard in various conversations about certain curricula being said, and certain requirements for teachers as far as the pre-K program.

I was hoping you could walk me through, or clarify for me how that would work in setting up slots in existing privately-run pre-Ks, for example with regard to something like a Montessori school.

Would this program require a curriculum, a specific curriculum and specific requirements for the teachers? Would that be compatible with let's say a Montessori program?

JANICE GRENDEL: May I break those apart, and answer them in two parts very briefly? Let me do the curriculum piece first.

What the Commissioner of Education has suggested, which is why we propose to include it in the Early Childhood Investment Initiative, is that we have one of the best curriculum frameworks in the country.

We created it as a consequence of the school readiness program. It's been evaluated along with all other learning standards. It's not a curriculum, per se. It's a framework.

It talks about what children need to know, not necessarily how you exactly teach them to do that.

It sets some outcomes in terms of their knowledge, skills and behavior. What we would like to do is to take the requirement that that framework be incorporated into existing school readiness programs.

That already happens. Nobody else is required to actually be very familiar with it.

What we'd like to do is to say, and in fact put some money in from the State Department of Education, take that curriculum model out.

That's good. It's a framework. Say to districts that receive any state money, you can't mandate if there's no monetary receipt.

We hope over time that districts who are working with three-and-four-year-olds and that receive any state funds, even if it's Care 4 Kids money that they need to incorporate the framework.

Whether they use their curriculum or a compatible curriculum that SDE says will get you there, that's fine.

We're not trying to tell them how to teach it. We're trying to say that there are some knowledge standards that we'd like everybody to know when they get to kindergarten.

I don't see an incompatibility at all. I will give you a specific example. There's something called the creative curriculum, which is a commercially available curriculum used in a lot of our cities right now.

It's had a wonderful run in Hartford. It's formed against our curriculum framework. It's a specific curriculum and it works, so they bought it.

There are lots of ways to get to this with being reasonable but expecting high standards.

On the workforce side of this I think we have a lot of talking to do about how we get to a real plan.

We don't have a plan yet to figure out how do we advance the educational levels and the training for our existing workforce.

The place where we have some leverage is where folks are receiving state money. We don't have a plan yet.

The State Department of Education surveyed school districts, and they found 8,000 kids who weren't ready.

They estimated, using current dollars it would cost $100 million to serve them. CEA and the Superintendents and the Connecticut AFT have said it's a $300 million job.

That implies a movement towards bachelor-level teachers. We're in there someplace. I think we need a plan for how the workforce piece is going to work, and it needs to be bottoms-up planning.

I don't subscribe to top-down. It needs to deal with workforce issues and financing issues.

I would love to be able to come back here in a year and say got a plan guys. We don't' have that yet.

I think the second issue I'm not going to answer because I'm not sure how to answer yet. I'm not sure totally how we want to get there.

That's the best I can do. Welcome from Madison, it's nice to have you out there. Thank you very much. Can I go now?

SEN. GAFFEY: Anybody else? Michael Winterfield.

MICHAEL WINTERFIELD: Janice Grendel is a truly amazing act to follow. Good afternoon, Senator Gaffey, Representative Fleischmann, Members of the Education Committee.

My name is Michael Winterfield. I am serving as the taskforce Co-Chair for the Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice.

You heard previously for Reverend Hjorth regarding our support for Senate Bill 1213. I'd like to make some supplementary comments in support of this bill.

We think you all have done an absolutely incredible job with what you're doing with this bill.

It's great that you're trying to put more money into educational cost-sharing grants. It's terrific that you have increased progressive income taxes as a funding mechanism.

It's terrific that this would help to reduce over-reliance on property taxes. The one thing that Reverend Hjorth spoke about and that I will second, we would implore you to consider going even further with the great stuff that you have in this bill.

Specifically, we think there is great merit in setting the threshold for increased taxes at $250,000.

This would allow you to sweep in approximately five percent of the families in the state.

We also think it would be an excellent idea given the needs ultimately to a lot more than six percent. We spoke about responsibility.

What I want to do, I'm a risk taker. I serve today as an example of a prosperous citizen who should be taxed more in order to provide support for public education.

I mean what I say. I learned a while ago that it's not good to pass the buck. The buck stops here.

Let me tell you why I feel the way I do. For many years I worked in the high levels of corporate America. I was very well paid to do that work.

I am proud of the work I did, but in the last few years the awards system really got a little bit crazy.

There were redundant awards. A company that I worked with, I don't think it was atypical.

I was part of a small group that essentially got all of the stock options, part of a small group that got paid for things like expense-conservation bonuses to get rid of lots of the people who worked for us.

I'm not proud of getting redundant awards of that nature. I feel this is the kind of reason why prosperous citizens like myself need to really ante up and pay in a little more.

I am the person who put together this petition in your package. I talk at our church with a lot of people who are in the higher-income categories.

We're getting bipartisan support for this, so you're doing great stuff. Please try to go as far as you can with this. It's badly needed.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate your testimony, and it's good to see you again. Representative Boucher would like to ask you a question.

REP. BOUCHER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I must say that you are truly one of a kind. You are truly unique.

In fact, I think the majority of us would probably agree that you should be knighted or suggested for sainthood. I would think that you might be a rare breed indeed.

Giving your best experience in that community, what do you think that others that would not be so inclined, that would not have the sort of value system that we obviously admire tremendously?

How do you think they would react to that kind of new system that you're proposing? Would they have a similar inclination that you would, or do you think that their reaction would be very different and might produce a negative?

It's been my experience that people tend to be a little bit more self-serving, they tend to be a little bit more selfish about their resources, particularly those with a great deal of resources.

In fact, I found the opposite. Those with less means tend to be more generous. We are of very generous nature from a charitable and philanthropic standpoint.

My parents, case in point, they had very little but shared everything they had.

MICHAEL WINTERFIELD: I have not done an extensive poll of wealthy people. I can tell you, again, a number of folks I know who make far more bucks than I have are very supportive.

In the work that Connecticut did, I think it's pretty notable that they have a poster child in none other than Warren Buffet.

Warren Buffet believes that folks like himself have a responsibility to give back. I know in other venues there are folks like Bill Gates who have said the same thing.

They do well, and they feel they have the responsibility to give back. I have to say I very much appreciate your comments.

I need to relay them to my wife. My wife is perhaps the kind of spouse like Janice Grendel's, who thinks he's a little bit crazy. She's come around to this idea as well.

REP. FLEISHCMANN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mike, I think you're a great person. I'm not sure about sainthood. I'm also less sure about your uniqueness.

If I remember correctly, you at ICEJ with others put up a petition regarding people's preparedness to see an increase in income taxes in the upper end in order to fund the kind of educational initiative you're testifying on behalf of today.

How has it been going in terms of getting signatories to that proposition?

MICHAEL WINTERFIELD: What we did initially, I tried to deal with petitions solely for people who were in the upper-income brackets.

It's not easy to have that kind of discretion. What I did instead is put together the petition that is attached to my testimony.

This petition has been getting about 90% support or higher with the folks that we've spoken with.

Again, in my place the Unitarian Society of Hartford, it's been 133 out of 136. We're going to keep going with this.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Could you repeat that? 133?

MICHAEL WINTERFIELD: One hundred thirty three of one hundred thirty six people whom I have personally spoken with. This is a bipartisan group.

We probably have more liberals than not where we are, but there are many conservatives in there as well.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Well, I appreciate that. I just wanted to be sure that Representative Boucher and others heard those kinds of figures.

I do think that folks underestimate the preparedness of the public to step up to the plate to make investments to ensure that we don't have kids who are showing up in prison because they never got past third grade literacy.

I very much appreciate the work you do on this.

SEN. GAFFEY: We're getting down there. Paquita Sims. Good evening.

PAQUITA SIMS: Good evening, Members of the Education Committee. My name is Winnie Dawson.

I'm a resident of Hartford representing the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance, which represents over 30 organizations statewide.

The Alliance goal is for all children born in Connecticut to enter kindergarten healthy, eager to learn and ready for school success.

I am appreciative of this opportunity to testify in support of House Bill 6680, Section Two, an act implementing the Governor's budget recommendations.

I'm here to testify in support of increasing the budget allocation [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 3B to Tape 4A.]

Under funded at a rate of $5,700 per preschool child compared to $7,500 per child for school readiness programs.

An additional $18,812,500 is needed to ensure that these centers are equitably funded.

By eliminating $11 million allocated to school readiness plus competitive grants and allocating it to DSS-funded centers these centers will become considerably closer to equitable funding.

DSS-funded centers are high quality early care centers in education programs, which serve some 4,300 children across the state.

These inequities in funding have driven many DSS programs into deficit. The State of Connecticut has a great responsibility to the children and families that we serve.

Under no circumstances should we think of moving forward an agenda, which leaves behind a struggling program full of thousands of children and families that depend on them.

We need to provide support to programs, which we started and the means for sustaining them because of the children.

INGRID HINDLER: Hello, my name is Ingrid Hindler. I'm a teacher at Mount Olive Child Development Center in Hartford.

At a state-funded center such as ours, we're committed to providing high quality care and education.

In order to do so, we need to be able to attract and retained a qualified, skilled resource.

Current levels of funding do not support the retention of qualified working staff. I have an associate's degree in early childhood and am presently pursuing a bachelor degree.

With the present increase of cost of living and being unable to receive a COLA, for the past three years this has put a hold on furthering my education, which is necessary for me and the children I work with.

I love working at the preschool level because I am able to see caterpillars transform into butterflies before my eyes each and every day.

They're able to complete tasks that were once impossible for them to do. I've said over the years that our center's a training field for the school system because of the vast discrepancy in pay and benefits.

Many teachers love the early childhood field but cannot afford to stay in it. Our children deserve the best-qualified and dedicated teachers.

An example of transformation that has touched the core of my heart is a child that I presently have in my classroom.

Upon starting in September, this four-year-old child was withdrawn, quiet, not toilet trained and did not act physically or verbally with peers or teachers.

Daily communication with his parents and planned, purposeful activities helped him to develop those skills that he was lacking.

To see him at this present time thoroughly depicts the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

He's now able to communicate more verbally, and is able to share affection with a smile or a hug. The change that has occurred in him is preparing him for the future.

We talk about school readiness and the difference between DSS-funded programs, but we do the same thing as a school readiness classroom for a school readiness school.

We're asking that these DSS-funded programs will look equally on it as a school readiness program.

We do give quality care and education to the future leaders of this state and country. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much for that very eloquent testimony. Are there questions from Members of the Committee? Yes, Representative Davis.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One thing I'd like to ask you. I heard you saying you have an associate's degree.

One of our proposals indicated that we're looking in future years for people in early childhood education to have bachelor's degrees, how do you feel about that?

INGRID HINDLER: I was pursuing that bachelor's right now while I was at Central. Right now, Central is no longer providing early childhood bachelors, which is something.

I'd really like to stay within that field. I don't mind achieving my bachelor's because it's better for me and also being able to provide for the children that I see each and every day.

To the best that I can, I give back to those children. That procedure would be my problem.

REP. DAVIS: But part of our initiative would also be to have to establish the programs for teachers that are going into it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you, Representative. Are there any other questions? If not, thank you very much for your time and your patience.

There was an inadvertent skipping that went on, so we're going to go back to a Ms. Tammy Papa.

TAMMY PAPA: Thank you so much, and thank you for the opportunity. Representative Fleischmann, Representative Reinoso, Ranking Members and Members of the Education Committee, I appreciate your staying here.

Good evening. My name is Tammy Papa. I serve as the Lighthouse after school program director in Bridgeport.

I know you've heard quite a bit about urban centers, so I will not belabor that in the interests of time.

I also sit on the Connecticut After School Council, the Connecticut After School Alliance and the School Readiness Council in the City of Bridgeport.

I'm here today to ask for your support for House Bill 6802. I believe you've been provided with a copy of my testimony, so in the interest of time I'll just walk through it a little bit.

If there're any questions we can go from there. A little bit about the history of our program in Bridgeport, and I can speak specifically for Bridgeport because I'm most familiar with that.

I also play a large role in the state, and I'm very supportive of whatever we can do to bring more after school dollars to the entire state and to all the programs that serve our children here.

We began in 1993. We partner, collaborate with numerous faith-based and community-based organizations.

It's a partnership that is developed with the City of Bridgeport and the Board of Education.

We serve approximately 3,000 Bridgeport children in 29 public schools in grades k through 12 during the school year and during the summer.

We provide a wide variety of programs after school and opportunities for children to succeed.

The percentage of public school students that we service is approximately 15% over 23,000 students. We're roughly at 3,000 children a day.

A little bit about our budget history. We've grown form $8 million, and you have the graph in front of you, in 2002-2003 to where we will be next school year, which is roughly about $2.1 million.

The reason for this is basically because I believe my counterpart, Sue Tenorio, from Danbury already spoke to you about that.

The 21^st Century Grant was on the federal level. Connecticut fared very well when we competed competitively.

Dollars came to the state simply because of the way the formula worked. Connecticut is not a large state.

We will probably see a maximum of about $10 million on the state level. Bridgeport alone was getting $6.5 million from the federal government.

Suffice it to say we will never do as well as we had been doing on the federal level. Our recent evaluation findings for Bridgeport, and again I can only speak for Bridgeport.

We have an ongoing five-year study with Yale, and just some of the very important points that have come out of this. This is a study that they did on their own.

It shows not only academic growth but higher expectations of success among participants and a lower body mass index among those participating in our after school programs.

With MRM, which is our yearly evaluator, they're affiliated with the lab at Brown University. We have 96.2% of participating students rarely being absent from school.

Ninety one percent had a reduction in discipline referrals, and 63.4% of parents were more active in their child's school.

Obviously that leads to a higher success rate. Going back to the higher expectations of success, and I'll wrap it up with this.

It's important because it means that children participating in quality after school programs believe that they can succeed.

If they do believe that they will obviously achieve. We do note that this funding will have to make some tough decisions in Bridgeport.

Right now over 60% of our parents attend the program for free because of their income guidelines.

We do not want to have to raise rates on those parents who are already strapped. As you know, your support of this is very critical because in most urban centers we just do not have the resources available.

Parents don't have the resources to send their children elsewhere. I thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.

I'd love to be able to offer more output in the studies that have been done in Bridgeport because I think that across Connecticut, they probably work well in those areas.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you for your testimony. Quick question. You caught my attention with the data regarding body max index. Obviously childhood obesity is a concern that we have on this Committee.

Do you think the better numbers that you found reflect the fact that you have kids who are keeping more active in the after school hours as a result of their participation?

TAMMY PAPA: When Dr. Mohoni from Yale did the study it was quite clear and I think a lot of it is rather obvious.

If children are kept active after school and are not home in front of the TV eating and sitting there, then no matter what they're doing they're probably more likely to do better, have less body mass index.

The surprising thing about the study was even if there were children in the program who were obese they were more accepted and felt more comfortable with their peers.

That doesn't generally happen among children who suffer from obesity. By and far they are much better off in a program or some type of structured activity during those after school hours than going home and sitting in front of the TV or computer or playing video games.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you. Representative Reinoso has a question.

REP. REINOSO: Good afternoon, Tammy. Tammy, the program you have for the summer, from the dates that you used from 2002-2003 when you used about $8 million and at this point, could you tell me what your summer program is right now?

TAMMY PAPA: Right now we plan on having a five-week summer program. We may have to cut that back to four weeks.

We were at six weeks when we had the $8 million, so we've been gradually cutting back. We may go to four o'clock as opposed to five o'clock.

We would hope not to have to close any of the 29 elementary schools. We're in 28 during the summer and hope to be able to service the same number of children, but maybe for less time and less hours.

Then in respect to the other piece of what we do with the older population, is the training and employment program.

That's all going to be about nonexistent in the summer if we don't do something quickly.

REP. REINOSO: Another question, Mr. Chairman. For those kids that are in high school, I'm assuming because they are involved in the program, the acceptance to college is high. Could you tell me the numbers?

TAMMY PAPA: We don't have specific data about the high school population. I do know that the gal in our office does sit with each of the youth and the majority of them have gone on to college.

I cannot give you to statistics as to whether or not they've graduated. We're fortunate to have quite a few of them come back into the office to visit us, and they continue to work with us through their college years.

For a specific number of youth we maintain a close working relationship. We've recently begun talking to the guidance counselors at each of the high schools about the possibility of tracking what these youth are involved in their high school years.

What are they doing after they finish high school, and how has what we have done possibly impacted their successes in the future? That's a study that's in the works right now.

REP. REINOSO: Tammy, just from a personal note. I just want to say thank you for your advocacy and your professionalism.

I've known you for maybe 15 years, and I know how hard you work for the kids. I want to say thank you.

TAMMY PAPA: Thank you for being there and supporting us.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you, Representative Reinoso. Any further questions? Thank you very much, Tammy, for your patience and your good work.

Next up it looks like, and excuse me if I get this wrong, Patricia Charles. Judy Goldfarb is on deck. Patricia, I'm glad to have you here.

PATRICIA CHARLES: It's very exciting to hear about the incredible accomplishments that Bridgeport has made with their $8 million that they started with.

Now you're going to hear about the other end. I'm from Plainville, and we are one of the districts that you did a special appropriation for, for $50,000.

We are just starting our program, and are very, very thankful to have had the opportunity to do that.

Obviously, I'm here today to testify in support of Raised House Bill 6802, AN ACT CONCERNING A CONNECTICUT OUT OF SCHOOL TIME GRANT.

I will forego the statistics about the benefits of an after school program. In short, there is a chronic shortage of after school programs.

According to parents the need far exceeds the current supply. Last year in Plainville with your help, with the special appropriation, it allowed our community to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment.

We implemented an after school program which specifically responded to those needs. Plainville families indicated a need for well-supervised, fulfilling activities particularly at the middle school level.

Parents wanted their young adolescents to participate in a safe and engaging program. We also asked for academic support for homework and tutoring in areas of weakness.

Partners from the Plainville area were able to join together to start a small program at our middle school next year to begin to address some of these needs.

Nonprofits, town agencies and local businesses are working together to provide enriching after school experiences to students in grades five through eight.

Many more children and families need these after school programs. I urge you to consider the small towns like Plainville when disseminating these funds.

We don't qualify for priority district funds or federal dollars for after school programs while we face significant needs. We seldom can compete with larger districts for these important dollars.

Your special appropriation allowed us to initiate an important program that the community embraced and then supported with additional dollars from local citizens and businesses.

Your money has been critical to our program, and will be one part of our sustainability effort.

I ask that you support this bill for $5 million in grant money to support our after school programs and that you allow large and small districts to compete for these funds.

I thank you, and particularly Representative Betty Boukus for the opportunity to initiate this program and to express to you what a small town can do with such an appropriation.

I testify before you today in support of this important bill for all children in our state.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you for your eloquent testimony and your commitment to these issues.

We recognize that there's a lot of time and effort that you've invested in Plainville on this issue. We appreciate it.

Are there questions from Members of the Committee? If not, just to let you know that Representative Boukus is a real target. Thank you for your testimony.

Next up is Judy Goldfarb. She gave up. It's fortunate we have someone who's been taking attendance here today. Rachael Jackman. The few, the proud, the GESO.

RACHAEL JACKMAN: I just want to thank everyone for sticking around as long as everyone has. My name is Rachael Jackman, and I'm a fourth-year PhD student in the immunobiology department at Yale University.

I'm here to support House Bill 6823. In the wake of the recent remarks made by Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, several things have come to light.

First, it is clear that some administrators are under the impression that women are not good enough in science.

I would like to assure you that I, as well as the women I work with like Sharon here, are exceptionally talented and just as capable as men.

Second, discrimination is still occurring in the higher science faculty. In the biological sciences at Yale, my division, only 17% of the tenured faculty are women.

The physical sciences are even worse with only 7% women. In my department, roughly half of the post-doctoral researchers are women.

In my PhD program, women are actually the slight majority. Women have comprised close to half the recipients of PhDs in biology for many years, but we are still not being hired for the tenured and tenure-track jobs.

There are a number of things that universities could do besides hiring more women that would actually enable a lot of them to pursue their careers in science, such as providing affordable daycare and healthcare.

I'm not asking you as the Connecticut Legislature to regulate the policies. These are fights that we need to have on our individual campuses.

I can tell you how disclosing the statistics on the number of women faculty in science can help.

Talented female high school students who want to pursue degrees in math and science will look for colleges that have female professors in these fields.

If the college wants to compete for the best and the brightest they will have to change their hiring practices to include more women on the faculty.

I care about their hiring processes for another reason. I love science, and I want a job as a biology professor.

I don't want to end up like many of the women I know who have given up when they see that universities have no good jobs available to them.

As a woman who's pursuing a scientific career, I have also thought of female faculty as mentors.

This has been crucial to my choice to pursue science as a career. I want to make sure that women in Connecticut have the same opportunities during their college education.

Along with my testimony I've submitted a summary of studies on how important mentors are for women in the sciences, as well as other representative minorities.

I urge you to support House Bill 6823, AN ACT FOR ACCOUNTABILITY IN EDUCATION.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Thank you very much for your testimony, which was not only extremely clear but concise enough that you didn't even have to listen to the bell.

I just want you to know that you have sympathetic ears on this Committee. Representative Heinrich is a molecular biologist, so she has familiarity with the path that you're traveling and sympathy, as do all of us.

Are there any questions? Representative Boucher.

REP. BOUCHER: Thank you, Chairman. Just from my side of the aisle, also my daughter who is a scientist and took her biology at Yale during the summer, I have to tell you I'm also quite sensitive to this topic.

It comes up frequently in our household. It was a very enlightening day to have the testimony brought forward.

I'm also glad you mentioned that you're not here to regulate, in essence, because it's harder to do with private institutions.

It was remarkable that we heard from the private colleges, but I would suspect it's also true in our public state university system as well.

I thank you for coming forward, and yes we can attest to the fact that women are just as talented in the sciences as men are. Thank you.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: Rachael, just one question for you. You probably heard the independent colleges testifying earlier in this long day.

They indicated that they had concerns about having the categories in the bill better match the federal reporting categories that are currently used, and modifying the language about disclosure on the website.

Would I be right in thinking that those small modifications would be acceptable so long as we got to the goal of making it much easier for you and other people applying to grad school or to college to find the information you're looking for?

RACHAEL JACKMAN: I think generally, sure. I think I'd want to make sure that they really were acceptable.

I think a lot of these universities have gone to great lengths to make sure this information is very difficult to find.

I'm a little bit skeptical, actually, when people start saying well move it off the front website, move it further and further away.

I understand the need to make sure this information is readily available. I also think it's important, there's a lot of discussion about not disclosing the information by departments.

I think that's actually really an essential part of this. As a student in immunology I don't expect to find a mentor in the French department, so it matters really where these women are.

Some of these departments are a really small percentage. A lot of them are a really small percentage, but some are worse than others too.

I think the departments that are having more success can be assets to the departments that are struggling.

I think people can actually learn by looking at these numbers this way. I think it's shocking that the universities are so unwilling to do that.

REP. FLEISCHMANN: It's a great point. I had the same reaction as I listened to caveats about having departmentally-listed faculty.

I think you're absolutely right, and I share your skepticism, which is the reason this bill is before us today.

Thank you very much for taking the time and sticking it out until nearly six. And who's your partner?

RACHAEL JACKMAN: Mrs. Shannon Anderson. She's also another graduate student in the biology program.

REP. FLEISCHMAN: Terrific. Onward and upward. I have admiration for all of you in graduate school. When I was in graduate school I started calling it gradual school.

It's a long, long road. I admire your perseverance. Juleen Flanigan.

JULEEN FLANIGAN: Good evening, I think it's evening. Thank you so much for hanging around and listening to all of us, including that wonderful group that's just leaving.

I am Juleen Flanigan, and I a m here to represent the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance, which is the consortium of over 30 organizations local and statewide groups who have a tremendous commitment to quality early care, education and family life.

We've heard a lot today about many aspects of it. I'm just going to speak briefly about two, and that is in the House Bill 6680, we support strongly the development of the Early Childhood Investment Advisory Cabinet.

Many of the people on the Alliance came to become members of the Alliance because of years of working in communities, like myself, where we're trying to piece together funding streams to make programs work.

In early childhood, probably because ten years ago early childhood wasn't what it is today and funding came in different formulas from different initiatives.

Consequently we still have these funding streams that are not coordinated. On the provider and the community level it's very difficult to piece those together.

It's also something that has caused us as organizations to vie for the same dollars through the Department of Education, Department of Social Services, Department of Public Health because we're not coordinated.

That's what we believe that this cabinet will be able to do. The Alliance is very strongly in favor of that.

We would like to see a connection with that state-level cabinet with local planning groups, school readiness councils are an example.

Other communities have other groups that represent not only providers, but educators, parents, social services, all the services that really families need to support them while they're raising their young children.

We'd like to see some kind of a formal link between that state-level cabinet and local planning groups.

Help support those initiatives that they come up with and implement them. Lastly, I would just like to say that when we spoke earlier about the state-funded centers, which is not even on your agenda because it's on another department.

Those 4,300 children who are in the state-funded centers are entering kindergarten just like our school readiness children are in the next two to three years.

Those programs are operating with a minimum of $2,000 less in funds with hopefully working towards the same outcomes, but at a great disadvantage.

As many of you know, a number of those state-funded centers are in jeopardy of going out of business because they cannot operate.

I conclude by saying thank you for the great initiatives in this bill. I truly hope that we can implement that cabinet to improve coordination and fiscal coordination of services.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much, and I can't agree with your testimony more with regard to your local tie-in.

I know that I will not let a bill go through the Senate unless it has the time of grassroots-up approach that we initiated. I can assure you of that. Thanks for hanging in there today.

It's been a long day. I appreciate your testimony. Thank you very much. Pat Charles. Pat's not here? Dr. David Snead?

Superintendent Snead, it's good to see you. Thank you for your perseverance. How's everything in the fine City of Waterbury? Welcome the delegation from Waterbury.

DR. DAVID SNEAD: The water's fine in Waterbury. We're getting better. Thank you. We thank you, Senator Gaffey, and the rest of the distinguished Members of the Committee for allowing us to make this presentation today.

I'm also thankful that my community asked me to make the presentation on their behalf. I'm Dr. David Snead, Waterbury Superintendent of schools and proud of it.

In Waterbury we have almost 18,000 students, many of whom need quality after school programs. I am pleased to testify today on behalf of the Waterbury community in support of House Bill 6802.

Waterbury has been at the forefront in recognizing the need for after school programs.

In 1998, a needs assessment was supported by the Connecticut Community Foundation and the United Way.

It was inclusive of the entire community-detailed specific needs for educational enrichment in recreational programs for youth aged 9 to 14 in the poorest neighborhoods of our city.

Based on these identified needs, our community came together, which included funders, the school system, parks and recreation, faith-based communities, youth agencies as well as arts agencies, and developed a network of programs.

I am pleased to say that a network of programs operating in 24 sites serving more than 750 children three to four times weekly exist today.

Many of these programs are supported from a variety of sources, such as the 21^st Century Community Learning Center Grants, Office of Policy and Management Juvenile Justice grants.

There are also private funds, including grants from the Connecticut Community foundation, the Libra Foundation and the United Way.

We have developed and built a system of after school programs that meet the needs of working parents, which are being located in a variety of sites including schools, neighborhood facilities and churches.

They provide educational and enrichment activities for our most at-risk students. The success of our programs is demonstrated by high attendance, in many cases more than 90%.

Academic success has more than 50% of the students showing improvements in math and reading skills.

Academic gains are measured by examining report cards for examining math and reading in the first and third marking periods of the year.

We recognize the importance of leveraging scarce resources and sharing knowledge and best practices.

We have created a public-private partnership of providers, funders and others facilitated and coordinated by Waterbury Youth Service System, which is the City's Youth Service Bureau.

This diverse network comes together to identify gaps in programming to share ideas for activities, to develop a directory of after school offerings and to participate in joint professional development.

Despite our gains we still serve only 20% of the target population. I'll repeat that. Despite our gains we still only serve only 20% of the target population.

Many children cannot be in our programs due to space and funding limitations. At the same time, we face reductions in support for our existing after school programs.

Recently, our community launched a planning effort to sustain the programs we have as 21^st Century and private funding declines.

Funding through the 21^st century community learning centers grant is reduced in years four and five of each program.

Grants from local foundations have also been reduced. Waterbury supports House Bill 6802 because it addresses the critical need for after school programs.

The emphasis on community partnerships, leveraging of private resources and the inclusion of statewide training is to be commended.

However, I want to share three concerns. We urge the Legislature to ensure that the appropriated funds are used to sustain quality existing programs in addition to creating new ones.

Specifically, I would like to note that the source of funding for existing 21^st Century Community Center Learning Grants is federal, not state.

It would be heartbreaking to allow an existing proven program to end in one site, only to develop a new program in another.

Our youth cannot afford the time it takes to develop or rebuild an after school program, especially when we could lose excellent staff who have a popular relationship with the youth.

I'm coming to a close. Second, we ask that the eligibility language as spelled out in Section 1C be reviewed to allow a broad range of eligible applicants.

The strength of our after school network in Waterbury has been our diversity of providers, from schools to youth agencies to arts agencies and the partnership among these agencies.

Certified teachers provide instruction in neighborhood-based after school programs while artists from the museum and local dance companies provide enrichment activities in our school-based programs.

This synergy of resources and talent has been a key to the success of our programs as evidenced by the outcomes and most importantly the active participation of our youth.

Finally, we hope the funds included for strategic planning are utilized in a variety of different ways.

The ways include the support of new partnerships as well as sustaining and enhancing partnerships that have been nurtured in communities like ours.

On behalf of the City of Waterbury and its after school network, I thank you for this opportunity to share our support and offer our suggestions.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you, Superintendent, excellent testimony. I really appreciate you staying today to deliver that testimony. Do you want to introduce your compatriots from Waterbury?

DR. DAVID SNEAD: Linda Janowitz, she's a retired principal in our school system, but has come back to work with us to help us with our school readiness and after school programs.

Also Attorney Louise Brown, who is not only a grant writer, but a guru of all kinds of things in the City of Waterbury.

SEN. GAFFEY: Well, thank you all for coming. Let me just make a plea for you to contact Congresswoman Johnson. Tell her the importance of this 21^st Century Grant.

Sitting where she sits she can have a real impact on adding back money that the president just took away in his recent budget on the 21^st Century Grant.

She's got to understand, you ought to invite her down to see what to do there. She's my Congresswoman, she's your Congresswoman, and she should see what is going on in the Meriden Boys and Girls Club, and see what's going on over in Waterbury and all the activities that you have.

She should understand the importance to the nexus of the kids' education and how it helps them do better in school. I hope to do that.

I know that I'm after her to get down to Meriden to see what we're doing because it has dramatic, dramatic impact on these kids.

Good for you guys that you're working so hard on this. I really appreciate your efforts. Representative Boucher, would you like to ask a question?

REP. BOUCHER: Mr. Chairman, I'd appreciate it, we've been here so long we might at least, just to keep you here a minute longer.

I have two questions for you. The first one is, and it was asked earlier to another school system, your family resource centers at your schools.

Someone asked the question as to whether there was any synergy between the after school programs and whether they could be brought together in some fashion.

Does that make any sense, or is that even possible? The second question is, and I know we had studied on this Committee some issues, some barriers to achievement.

One of the big ones was something that's out of your control most of the time. That is, the children's transient nature of moving on a continuous basis, so you don't have the same group of kids sometimes at the end of the year that you start off with.

It makes it very, very hard. Some suggestions were given that maybe transportation could deal with this.

If you could keep the child in the same school even though they were moving to another part of the town that might help in improving their results.

I'd ask you to comment both on the idea of combining the family resource center, if that's not even a good idea or compatible. The other, about the bus and transient situation.

DR. DAVID SNEAD: Thank you very much. I am in agreement that the transience of our students is a problem.

I think the solution to it is making sure that instruction is consistent not only within our community, but within other communities that we receive the children from.

Not just in Connecticut, because we have a lot of youngsters out of New York City and some other places.

If we can come together on consistent standards for children at all grade levels relative to math, reading, writing what have you.

I think that will probably go a long way towards resolving that issue. Just providing transportation is a temporary solution.

Making sure that a third grader in Waterbury is being taught with the same expectations as a third grader in New York City I think is the direction we need to go into.

I'm going to ask Louise to tackle your first question.

LOUISE BROWN: In terms of our family resource center our experience in Waterbury is limited. We have two centers there, and they're both in elementary schools.

Our experience has been that the funding awarded essentially just barely covers the cost of administering the program.

To address the seven components that each family resource center is required to address they need to be very resourceful in reaching out to find providers already existing in the community.

They're looking for after school providers to come in, but they don't have funding for the family resource center branch adequate to actually run an after school program.

They may bring in a YMC or Computers for Kids, and partner with them to provide a program. The funding through FRC has not been adequate to actually fund extra programs.

DR. DAVID SNEAD: As a further addendum to that second question, we've rewritten our curriculum in Waterbury such that wherever the child transfers to within the City they are exposed to the same curriculum.

They're in similar places each day, no matter which school they go to.

REP. BOUCHER: I'm glad you brought that forward because that has been an issue. In fact, Senator Toni Harp had mentioned in another Committee meeting that she was very concerned about an under-performing school and their differences in curriculum.

She had even thought about the idea of mandating certain curriculum from the State Department of Education that can be used for very under-performing district schools in that particular curriculum area.

I'm glad that you're already addressing that, looking at consistency across the board. That articulation doesn't exist in a lot of our other cities.

DR. DAVID SNEAD: I'm glad you brought up the term mandate, because I would resist that vehemently.

I would say that yes, we can mandate standards, but to mandate a certain curriculum I think takes away the creativity of teachers and staff.

I know some school systems have done it. Inglewood, California for example gained some success with the Open Court reading program.

As a result some other Los Angeles and Detroit now and some other districts have adopted a mandated, scripted program where every child is on literally the same sentence at the same time every day.

The teachers are so bored with that, and it takes away so much other that they can give to the children that I as a superintendent tend to resist mandating a certain kind of curriculum.

I would rather mandate high standards and encourage high expectations. I would create a curriculum that everyone should adhere to, but still allow that flexibility and that leeway for teachers to have creativity within their classroom.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate your testimony. Have a good weekend. Who's here that wants to testify? Anyone else want to testify, that's remaining here? It's all yours, Sir.

GERALD FULLWOOD: The last one on the list. To the Chairpersons of this Committee, Legislators, friends of children in Connecticut, my name is Gerald B. Fullwood, Sr. of Hartford, Connecticut.

I'm here to speak on House Bill 6802. During the 2003 Connecticut State Mastery Test, the state average score for fourth graders' reading was 54.

The average score in Hartford was 20. In math, the state average was 58, in Hartford, 27. The bottom line is, kids in Hartford are not learning.

It is shocking to me that nobody has declared a state of emergency on education in Hartford.

The greatest threat to our future is a collapsed educational system. We are here with these grade results after spending hundreds of millions in funding for teachers' pay, new buildings and other things.

The results prove that whatever we are doing it isn't working. I am here before you to say that money is the least important asset in the fight for better education for our children in Hartford.

We have to find a way to reach these kids, hold their attention and convince them that they can not only compete, but they can excel.

I am here because I associate with an intervention that works. This intervention is based upon the principle that all kids can learn and that given the right supportive educational environment most kids do learn.

Starting with classes at one chain, I was able to teach chess to kids who the Mastery Test showed could not read.

These kids were getting failing grades in school and yet after a few chess lessons they could play chess well enough to beat many adults.

Now, at the Hartford Neighborhood Centers we have an excellent after school program. We pick up about 40 kids from their schools five days a week.

We help them with their homework, feed them a hot meal, provide them with a quality recreational experience and then drive them home shortly after six PM. The performance speaks for itself.

We are giving kids the skills and confidence to hold their own in school. I am here to tell you something can be done and something is being done.

I want you to first visit one of our after school classes, call our bluff and see for yourself that our program works.

Then I want you to add funds to our agency, so that we can reach a larger number of students.

In the after school program we drill kids on the basics and the fundamentals. You have to know how to add and subtract without using your fingers.

You must learn your timetables, and you must be able to read with understanding. At Hartford Neighborhood Centers we are doing that every day.

I ask you to allocate the funds for after school initiatives, so that the Hartford Neighborhood Centers and other organizations can move forward with kids with what works, and what works well.

I am very [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 4A to Tape 4B.]

For yourself. I want to thank you all for the time, and thank you for giving me a brief time to address you on behalf of this bill.

Let me just close and say I cannot think of more important work we have than to properly educate our children. This is a critical and crisis priority that deserves your full attention.

Again, I would ask you to fund this bill and make a way for those in our community who have solutions that work to come to the table and serve more kids. Thank you.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you for your testimony. You should be proud of what you do. I'm sure you're having a profound impact on the kids you serve, and you've made excellent points in your testimony.

As we strive to move this bill forward, I hope that other Committee down the hall, the Appropriations Committee puts adequate resources into this program.

It is working, obviously. Thank you. Representative Davis?

REP. DAVIS: Just a comment, particularly on the area of chess. I am a retired teacher of West Haven High School, and we have one teacher that started a chess program there several years ago.

West Haven High School has now won the State Chess Championship for seven of the last eight years, and he has developed a whole math curriculum that includes chess.

He found a tremendous improvement in test scores and the ability of kids to reason and learn because of the game.

He even asked me at some point in the future to talk to the Education Committee to expand on this principle, including chess.

He said he runs programs now throughout our area for kids in after school programs and is finding a tremendous improvement in schools just teaching chess.

It's very impressive. I congratulate you on your work. Keep it up. Thank you.

REP. REINOSO: I also wanted to say thank you for coming to testify. It's true. It's your responsibility.

It's also our responsibility to work and advocate for children, especially for programs like this. One piece in your presentation that I didn't hear is the role of the parents.

As you know, we have in the triangle we have the student, the system, which are teachers administrators and also parents.

All of us, we have to work together in order to fulfill our goals, which is to have more kids going to school, hopefully going to college and so forth.

What are your comments in that respect, parents' responsibility?

GERALD FULLWOOD: A lot of the kids we serve, parents work and get off work at five, six o'clock. It's almost like we baby-sit their kids from three to six o'clock.

Sometimes when parents get home from work, single parents like six o'clock and they have to cook and take care of their kids and put them to bed.

They have less time to do homework with the kids and all the things they should do. I agree that parents should have an active role in their kids' education.

Just to say, me for one, I have a daughter that teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park.

She'll be 41 in a couple of days. I have a son who is 11 years old that I've been very active with.

Just in January, he's in the fifth grade, the school invited him to take the SSAT's with the eighth graders.

The scores, he's 11, fifth grade, I think on January 9^th he took the SSAT's. He scored 83%.

I know that I have a great responsibility in that respect, but there are a lot of parents who would love to do that but just don't have the time.

They have jobs that don't pay a lot of money. They have to work. They get off at six o'clock, they have to come home and cook, get ready, all that.

They just don't have a lot of time to spend preparing kids, and that's where we come in. We do the homework with them, feed them a little hot meal and deliver them home about 6:30.

That takes the pressure of those parents. I agree that parents should have the greatest role in the educational process.

SEN. GAFFEY: Thank you very much for your testimony and your patience.

UNKNOWN SPEAKR: Where's your program?

GERALD FULLWOOD: The Hartford Neighborhood Center. I left 50 copies of this. The Hartford Neighborhood Center is on 38 Lawrence Street, and it's an excellent program.

We've seen benefits and we've had teachers call us and say they've seen the benefits of us drilling kids in times tables and stuff like that.