CT House Speaker Confident on $170M School Funding Boost

House Speaker Matt Ritter told reporters Monday he’s confident the legislature can land on $170 million in new school aid this year, putting him on a collision course with Gov. Ned Lamont that will define Connecticut’s education debate for the 2026 budget cycle.

Ritter’s announcement landed hours after municipal officials filled the Capitol to warn that local budgets are buckling under education costs the state hasn’t kept up with. The Hartford Democrat framed his position with characteristic directness.

“I am confident we can get the governor to be comfortable with that number,” Ritter said.

Getting there won’t be easy. Lamont’s February budget proposal included zero additional school funding. By Thursday he’d moved to $100 million, which advocates called inadequate. Ritter’s $170 million ask is a jump from the $150 million House Democrats were circulating just weeks ago, and it’s nearly double what the governor originally put on the table.

The fight isn’t just about the total. It’s about where the money lives. Education advocates have pushed hard for the dollars to land inside the formal state budget rather than come out of a separate reserve fund, arguing that one-time payments tend to vanish when the next budget cycle opens. Ritter addressed that concern head-on.

“If we pay for 170 [million] in ECS and then next year say, ‘We didn’t mean it, it was one time,’ you’d get zero votes for that concept,” Ritter said.

ECS, the Education Cost Sharing grant, is the mechanism the state uses to funnel aid to local school districts. Special education spending has been a growing driver of local cost pressures, with districts absorbing expenses the state formula doesn’t fully account for.

Republicans say they’d go further

Republicans have offered their own plan, claiming it would deliver $335 million to schools. That figure comes with strings attached. The proposal depends on winning a tax dispute against New York over work-from-home income, and on eliminating health coverage for some undocumented residents. Neither outcome is guaranteed. Democrats haven’t shown any appetite for either trade.

Towns say $170 million still isn’t enough

Municipal leaders who packed the Capitol on Monday weren’t celebrating Ritter’s number. They want more, and they said so plainly. Joe DeLong, who leads the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, didn’t sugarcoat his assessment of where negotiations stood.

“Let me tell you, $100 million put into education this year is probably a D-minus,” DeLong said.

He pushed the legislature to aim higher. “We’ve heard numbers like $180 million. I think $180 million should be a floor, not a ceiling,” DeLong said.

Mary Calorio, president of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, put the financial erosion in numbers towns can feel. Five or six years ago, the Education Cost Sharing grant covered roughly 25% of education costs for many small towns. That share has dropped to about 15%. A 10-point swing is real money, and local governments have had to find it somewhere.

Property taxpayers, mostly.

“That’s a big gap for them, for our property taxpayers, to absorb, and there’s nowhere else for the towns to go,” Calorio said.

That’s the bind. As the CT Mirror reported this week, 80 districts are waiting on the state to close the gap between what ECS promises and what it actually delivers. Twenty towns have seen local education costs climb faster than any aid increase has compensated for, straining budgets that can’t legally run deficits.

Ritter’s $170 million is a meaningful move from where this fight started. Whether it’s enough to satisfy towns, advocates, or the 20-odd House members from suburban districts who feel the property tax squeeze acutely is another question entirely. Lamont still hasn’t committed to the number. Budget negotiations continue, and the gap between the governor’s last public position and what House Democrats are now demanding sits at $70 million.

Seventy million dollars. In Connecticut’s fiscal math, that’s not a rounding error.