New CT State Budget: Town-by-Town Education Funding Breakdown

# Connecticut’s Education Funding Boost: What the Fully Funded ECS Grant Means for Your Town

Connecticut’s latest state budget marks a milestone for education funding, fully funding the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant for the first time ever. The new two-year, $55.8 billion budget puts about $2.4 billion each year into K-12 education.

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No towns will face funding cuts, and many will see real increases. This is a pretty big shift in how resources get distributed—affecting places from Bridgeport to Hartford, New Haven to Stamford, and plenty of towns in between.

Understanding Connecticut’s Education Cost Sharing Grant

The Education Cost Sharing grant is Connecticut’s main way of sending education dollars to towns. It’s a complicated formula, but the goal is pretty clear: try to make things fairer by considering what each district actually needs and what resources they already have.

How the ECS Formula Works

The ECS formula uses a few main ingredients to decide who gets what:

Student need factors, with extra weight for low-income students
Additional dollars for multilingual learners
Metrics that look at a town’s wealth and ability to pay for schools
A phased schedule that adjusts grants over time

The formula is supposed to send more money to places with higher needs and fewer local resources. Take Waterbury and New Britain, for example—they get a lot of support because they have more students who need extra help.

Winners in the New Budget

About 70 Connecticut towns will get bigger ECS grants in this new budget. Some of the state’s largest cities, which have struggled for years, are finally seeing meaningful boosts.

Cities Seeing the Biggest Gains

Several municipalities are getting significant increases this time around:

Bridgeport: About $10 million more each year
Danbury: Roughly $10 million extra per year
New Britain: Another $10 million or so annually
Waterbury: Also getting a $10 million yearly bump

These increases show the state’s effort to tackle educational gaps, especially in places with lots of low-income students and English learners.

Stability for “Overfunded” Towns

The new budget puts off planned reductions for towns labeled “overfunded” by the ECS formula. So, communities like Greenwich and West Hartford won’t see cuts—they’ll keep their current funding for at least the next two years.

The Flat Funding Reality

While 70 towns get more, 96 municipalities will have flat funding for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. For towns like Fairfield and Simsbury, that means they’ll have to handle rising education costs without extra help from the state.

Challenges Despite the Funding Boost

Even with this historic full funding, education advocates say Connecticut still has work to do on school funding. The landscape remains tricky, and not every challenge disappears overnight.

Ongoing Budget Pressures

Many districts are dealing with rising costs that keep outpacing funding increases. Here are a few of the big ones:

Special education expenses—these are only partly covered by separate, targeted grants.
Transportation costs keep going up, too.
There’s always some new infrastructure or construction project on the horizon.
Salary and benefit increases for educational staff just keep adding up.

ECS grants come in at $2.4 billion a year, which sounds impressive. Still, that’s just one piece of Connecticut’s education funding puzzle.

Those grants make up over half of the state’s total education funding. But they don’t stretch far enough to cover all the specialized programs and services schools need.

State funds cover about 35% of public school funding in Connecticut. Local property taxes and federal sources fill in the rest.

Even if ECS funding were maxed out, communities like Norwich and Torrington still have to lean pretty heavily on local resources to meet their education needs. It’s a tough balancing act, honestly.

Here is the source article for this story: See how much education funding your CT town is set to receive under the new state budget

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