Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Biennial Budget Address
February 5th
By Barbara Heimlich, Editor Stratford Crier; Natasha Sokoloff
Governor Lamont’s Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Biennial Budget Address on February 5th addressed many issues facing Connecticut, but the most watched and commented on were his proposals addressing the state’s K-12 schools. His proposals were especially important given the tenuous state of the U.S. Department of Education. Connecticut schools were already under the threat of loss of funding, and most towns in the state are ill-prepared to cover their costs without federal aid.
A Universal Preschool Endowment program may be the most significant new initiative among Lamont’s proposals for the new budget. Universal preschool in Connecticut will still be years away, but Lamont’s proposal signals a monumental investment into early education that would eventually provide free preschool for families with incomes of $100,000 or less, and with small fees for those with higher incomes by depositing hundreds of millions of dollars into essentially an early childhood trust fund.
Establishing and capitalizing an endowment would support the expansion of preschool for three-, four-, and five-year-olds not yet eligible for kindergarten. To fund the endowment, $300 million of the unappropriated surplus for fiscal year 2025 would be transferred to it. Every year after, the unappropriated surplus in the general fund would go towards it. The universal preschool endowment is ultimately made possible through adjusting Connecticut’s “fiscal guardrails”, which constrain how much the legislature can spend in a given year. While Lamont had previously opposed the prospect of tweaking them, he is now calling for raising the state’s volatility cap.
By 2032, the endowment would provide for a reduction in the cost of approximately 19,000 existing spaces for families earning at or below $150,000, according to the budget proposal. Additionally, the endowment will expand pre-school access with approximately 12,000 new spaces and over 7,500 extended day preschool spaces by 2032.
Also important, given the uptick in residents deemed food insecure, would be the implementation of free school breakfast for all Connecticut schools. In 2027, breakfast could be free, bringing back a pandemic-era offering that education advocates and school leaders have missed. The cost of school meals has been a stressor for districts across the state in the last couple of years, as federal pandemic relief funds dried up and the waivers that allowed districts to offer breakfast and lunch for free to all students are gone. Lamont is proposing $12.4 million in fiscal 2027 for a universal free school breakfast program. The majority of funding for school meals in Connecticut has generally come from the federal level, with state and local money filling in the gaps. The millions proposed in the budget could make a significant difference for schools across the state, especially as fears of a loss or pause of federal funding loom.
Lamont’s budget proposal includes $700,000 in fiscal year 2026 to eliminate reduced-price lunch and breakfast fees for students statewide. This would essentially continue the current program, in which students in Connecticut who qualify for reduced-price meals at school receive breakfast and lunch free of charge. This year’s program was made possible through reduced-price meal legislation, using the last of the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act of 2021) funds.
As other states, including many districts in CT, implement restriction on cellphones in schools, Lamont’s budget proposal includes a $100,000 competitive grant program for districts to implement new restrictions of cellphones in schools.
“Superintendents are working hard to get smartphones out of most of the classrooms, and our budget provides resources to store those phones at the beginning of a phone-free day, in phone-free schools,” Lamont said in his budget address. “Remember those Yondr pouches?”
There are currently a handful of bills in the legislature that aim to restrict cellphone use in schools, but the pouches and materials to actually store phones can get expensive for districts. As a single pouch can cost a district between $34 and $37, $100,000 would not be nearly enough to fully fund Yondr pouches for districts statewide, but Lamont’s proposal to put at least some money toward that goal could give the cellphone bills momentum in the session, and schools some extra help with cellphone bans.
Special Education was a major focus for this legislative session, but Lamont’s special education proposal was met with both appreciation and frustration. Lamont’s budget proposal specifically included increasing the Excess Cost Grant by $40 million for fiscal year 2027. The grant subsidizes high-cost placements for students with the greatest needs, based on a reimbursement threshold. Advocates and some state officials said that amount was not nearly enough.
There was generally more support for his proposal on a new grant program as an incentive for special education programming within districts, through $10 million from the General Fund and $4 million in bond funds for fiscal year 2027. The High-Quality Special Education Incentive Grant program aims to reduce out-of-district special education placements, which can drive high costs, and allow districts to expand their capacity to provide high-quality special education in-district or on a regional basis. It would be administered by the state Department of Education.
The state Department of Education anticipates that approximately 40 districts would apply for these funds, with a maximum award of $250,000 annually on the operating side, or $150,000 on the capital improvement side, according to budget documents.
Lamont is pushing for $1.1 billion in new school construction authorizations over the next two years, reducing grants for local school construction by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, compared to what funding has looked like previously. His proposal recommends $550 million in each year for school construction. That’s around half of what the state’s school project priority list cost in 2023-2024.
Jeff Beckham, the governor’s budget chief, said in a press conference Wednesday that this year’s priority list for construction was “much lower” than last year, which was around a billion dollars. “That did give us pause,” he said. But, he added, that amount has come down and they were building into the budget what agencies were telling them they needed. In total, the state’s Department of Administrative Services is recommending $152.4 million in grants to support school building projects for 2025 in Fairfield, Greenwich, Norwich, Plainville and Woodbridge.
