CT free school lunch, school safety among lawmakers’ priorities
From efforts to fund early childhood education to improving child care options to providing free meals in schools to all students and purchasing new technology so police can respond faster to school shootings, lawmakers and child welfare advocates have a slew of goals for this year’s legislative session.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Senate Democrats announced that early childhood education to age 5 would be a top priority for the 2025 legislative session. Senate Bill 6, “An Act Concerning Resources and Supports for Infants, Toddlers and Disconnected Youths,” would support emotional and social learning for children before they get to kindergarten, in an effort to set them on a path to success.
Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, painted a bleak picture of how Connecticut children fall behind when they’re not supported early, saying that for some of these children, “the concept of a book is foreign” when they arrive in kindergarten.
“One of the problems we are very much aware of is there are so many children that come to kindergarten unprepared to be there, and they begin the downward spiral by being disengaged from school, somewhat humiliated by what they experience there, aware of their own deficits,” Looney said.
Looney said these children end up missing school, dropping out in ninth grade with a sixth-grade level of education only to “become part of that cohort of 16- to 24-year-olds that the 119 project has talked about. We need to have a major intervention for children before they become the next cohort of those disaffected, disengaged teens and young adults.”
Looney was making reference to work by the 119k Commission, a group mostly made up of town mayors that is studying how an estimated 119,000 young people in the state became “at risk” or “disconnected.” That issue was highlighted by a previous report from Dalio Education, a grant foundation that engages with public school communities and provides funding to several nonprofits.
In the Dalio report, “disconnected” youth were defined as high school graduates who are neither employed nor enrolled in higher education, high school non-graduates who were employed, young adults who had neither a high school diploma nor employment, and incarcerated individuals in that age group. “At risk” youth were defined as high schoolers who had a low number of credits and were not on track to graduate on time and students struggling with other factors including chronic absenteeism or behavioral issues.
Sen. Ceci Maher, D-Wilton, co-chair of the Committee on Children, said at the press conference that the bill would use the research into the causes of disconnection to better understand what support systems are needed, with an emphasis on social and emotional learning. She also said that when the kindergarten start age shifted in September 2024, some children fell into a no-man’s land: they were in neither school nor child care.
Maher also said in an interview that helping parents access child care — a shrinking industry in Connecticut — is at the top of her list of priorities for 2025.
Child care is “absolutely essential to families, to the growth and development of children, and for the future of our state,” Maher said.
Gov. Ned Lamont convened a Blue Ribbon Panel to study the issue in 2023. The resulting report recommended increasing compensation for providers serving high-needs groups, creating new scholarships for those in the educational pipeline, and making improvements to system infrastructure, among other objectives.
The estimated cost of the report’s five-year plan was over $2 billion. Maher said the panel, convened by the Office of Early Childhood, made it clear what must be done to achieve progress on the issue and that she plans to drive legislation based on the report through the Committee on Children.
“A line has been drawn in the sand,” Maher said.
Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, the committee’s newly appointed co-chair, echoed Maher’s sentiments.
“I think child care is first and foremost the backbone of family solvency and our state’s economy. When we make child care affordable and accessible, we will definitely be able to give families the ability to thrive and children the foundation to succeed,” he said.
Paris said he plans to pursue expanding eligibility for Care4Kids, a program that helps low- to middle-income families pay for child care, and wants to make it more affordable for people to get the credentials they need to go into the child care sector.
“We send these early educators to go off, get a bachelor’s degree, which is somewhere between [$50,000] to $60,000 on average,” Paris said. “They’re only making about $26,000 a year on average. And so you’re already going into debt to take on a career and job.”
Paris said it was also a priority to improve racial disparities in maternal health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are more than three times as likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause as white women.
Paris said providing better access to prenatal care, doula services and postpartum support would shift these “unacceptable” statistics.
“We can save lives and build a healthier future for families,” Paris said. “I truly believe that no mother should fear for her life while bringing a child into the world.”
Also high on the list for Maher: universal free meals for Connecticut students. States like Massachusetts, California and Maine offer students free breakfast and lunch regardless of their income level. It’s an expensive proposition, but based on a short-term experiment that used federal COVID funds to provide more free meals in Connecticut, Maher believes the policy would pay dividends.
“It was increasing attendance; it was decreasing truancy. It was increasing community, and it was increasing children’s ability to learn, because they weren’t hungry,” Maher said. “This is an example of using money wisely in the beginning to decrease negative outcomes at the end. So if the child can’t learn in school, then they’re going to fall further behind, or perhaps stop coming to school.”
Free universal school meals were also the No. 1 policy recommendation in a recent report from the Commission on Women, Children, Seniors, Equity and Opportunity. According to the report, many food-insecure families are not currently eligible for free school meals. Food pantries that provide supplemental food for such families are not usually able to offer a significant amount of fresh food, whereas universal free meals in schools would be able to provide more consistently nutritious meals for those children. Such programs could also include local purchasing requirements to support the local food system.
Maher also wants to bring forward a proposal to invest in silent panic alarms that school staff can use to quickly alert police of a security situation. Those buttons, worn on lanyards by staff at a Georgia high school, were used in 2024 during a mass shooting. Police responded in minutes, and the technology likely saved lives, according to authorities.
“Alyssa’s Law,” which is named for one of the victims of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., requires schools to have silent panic alarms that connect them to local law enforcement. The law has already passed in several states and is under consideration in many others.
The Committee on Children will also explore what actions might be taken to ensure the safety of children if they are affected by President Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations. It’s still not clear what those actions might be, but the sudden detention of parents without legal status could endanger scores of Connecticut children.
Maher and Paris also said that legislation concerning the lack of oversight of municipal camps in the state, which was brought to light after allegations of sexual misconduct in town-run programs in Bethany, would also be on the table.
Acting Child Advocate Christina Ghio said that her office is hoping to see children’s behavioral health better funded in 2025, including Medicaid reimbursement rates that are comparatively low, especially for behavioral health care.
Sarah Eagan, the executive director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy and the former state child advocate, said the group would also press lawmakers on the issue. Eagan said that while fiscal responsibility is needed, the state stands to lose in the long term if it doesn’t make an investment in children and families now.
“It is imperative for policymakers to adjust the framework for balancing the debt-to-investment ratio,” Eagan said. “The lack of meaningful investment that correlates to the level of need in our community will eventually, if not already, lead to catastrophe.”
In his State of the State speech on Jan. 8, Lamont mentioned the issue of child care several times.
After it was over, Maher walked out of the House gallery, tentatively pleased.
“I’m certainly happy to hear we’re going to be focusing on children and their well-being and child care,” she said.
But Maher was quick to press the issue of universal meals, one that was absent from the speech.
“I still want to see children being fed in schools, and I think that’s incredibly important for their well-being and for their ability to learn. All of the things we do cannot help if they can’t learn,” she said.
Jessika Harkay contributed reporting.
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