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The State Board of Education unanimously approved a budget reduction proposal thats cuts ten percent of its funding. The biggest cuts would come in grants or funding for local schools, which the Board acknowledges would cause "significant harm" to Connecticut students.

The state board proposed the cuts at the request of Governor Jodi Rell. She has called on all state agencies to plan for smaller budgets in anticipation of a deficit that could exceed 6 billion dollars over the next two years.

230 of the 283 million dollars in education cuts would come from reduced aid to local districts.

But the Board accompanied that proposal with a resolution, read by member Janet Finneran, that warns against enacting the cuts.
 
"It is impossible to identify cuts of the required magnitude without reducing those funds, which we recognize to be nothing more than a transfer of the fiscal crisis to the local districts and municipalities...:

The State Board endorsed some new funding requests for the next two years, including 49 million dollars for programs to comply with the Sheff vs. O'Neil school desegregation case, and more than half a million dollars to redesign the state high school curriculum.

The board's plan also calls for the J.M. Wright Technical School in Stamford to be closed for two years to save 8 million dollars. That school has struggled with declining enrollment, and the board hopes to make improvements and reopen it in 2011.   

Looking at the list of programs that could be cut, Chairman Allan Taylor stressed that lawmakers and the governor should find other places in the state budget to save. 

"All of the things on this list are things the state ought to be doing"

But the board's disclaimers did not satisfy Bristol Superintendent Philip Streifer. He says cuts to local aid will hurt poorer districts like his most, because they rely on state funding more than affluent areas.
 
"I've personally come to the conclusion that this is going to require court action."

He says that may come from a pending lawsuit that seeks to require the state to spend more money on education. That case is currently awaiting a decision by the state Supreme Court.