A crowd of several hundred convened at Central Connecticut State University on the morning of January 30, 2007 for the Citizens Network's statewide summit on school funding reform.

“The time for a real solution to Connecticut’s school funding crisis is now,” said Courtney Bourns, President of the Citizens Network of the Capital Region.

“This summit brings government leaders and other innovative thinkers together for a nonpartisan discussion about what we have to do to end our over-reliance on the property tax for school funding," Bourns continued.

“Everybody knows we can’t keep paying for something so important to Connecticut’s future as our schools the way we have been, relying heavily on a single tax. We’re at the breaking point. And with the report from the Governor’s Commission on Education Finance just released, the timing is perfect. We need to keep the momentum going until we fix the problem.”

National education finance specialist John L. Myers of the JLMyers Group in Lafayette, Colorado offered his insights on what other states have done to address their school funding problems. "There are some states that have full time commissions on education finance" that help translate the complexities of this issue to lawmakers and parents.

Myers described the Thornton commission approach in Maryland, as well as other states' approaches using an equalized, statewide property tax as a more fair fix to the inequities and other problems that result from relying on property taxes imposed unevenly from town to town.

It's not that Connecticut's policy process is broken, observed Economist Fred V. Carstensen, Director of the UConn Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, another panelist at the summit, in describing a good example in Kentucky's full-time, staffed nonpartisan center for long term policy studies. "You can't have good policy discussions if you don't have have some baseline analysis from which the discussion can proceed and which disciplines the discussion."

"We don't have a policy process. We create blue ribbon commissions that don't have any resources to do anything. There's not a systematic process for addressing these issues, and we need to do that."

"Too many folks in Connecticut take inordinate pride in our moniker "the land of steady habits," commented Jim Finley, newly appointed Executive Director and CEO of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.

"The south and west are eating our lunch in dealing with some of the tougher issues out there in the public policy arena, whether it's education finance, land use, worker housing, you name it, " Finley continued. "We have no shortage of good ideas in Connecticut, but the political will to implement change has been lacking."

"The fact of the matter is that Connecticut is way behind on these issues." - Jim Finley, CCM

Other panelists attending the summit were George Coleman, Interim Commissioner, Connecticut Department of Education ; Rep. Cameron C. Staples, Co-Chair, Finance, Revenue & Bonding Committee, Connecticut General Assembly; Sen. Eileen Daily, Co-Chair, Finance, Revenue & Bonding Committee, Connecticut General Assembly; Sen. Thomas P. Gaffey, Co-chair, Education Committee, Connecticut General Assembly; and Joseph F. Brennan, Senior Vice President of Public Policy, Connecticut Business & Industry Association.

The summit follows the Citizens Network’s 2006 report, “Fair Funding: Let’s Find a Better Way to Finance Local Public Education in Connecticut.”

The summit was co-sponsored by the Capitol Region Council of Governments; CCSU Institute for Municipal & Regional Policy, MetroHartford Alliance, League of Women Voters of Connecticut, Capital Region Education Council and Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. Special thanks to the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund for its funding support.