Every penny you earn is not yours to keep. As part of living in an organized society, you get things that you can’t provide for yourself. You have to pay for those things. You do know that you can’t pave and plow all your own roads and highways, right?
You also have to pay for things that make it possible for your organized society to continue and thrive in the future. You pay for public education, kindergarten – 12th grade, whether you have children enrolled or not. You pay taxes into that system because it serves this organized society from which you benefit.
Each generation that follows yours has to be educated and
Your state representatives’ jobs are not to go to Hartford and “get your money back”.
It’s not your money anymore. It’s the money that is to be used collectively to ensure that every child has access to free public education for the equal benefit of all people, according to the Constitution of the State of Connecticut.
It’s both to your benefit and required by the State Constitution that the tax money you contribute not just be handed back to you, but be distributed fairly to educate the approximately 530,000 kids in the state of Connecticut.
Nobody Cut Your ECS Funding
In 2017, the Connecticut legislature passed a new ECS (Education Cost Sharing) formula which is being implemented now and phased in over 10 years.
Your town might see less money each year. Instead of looking at it as a cut, the more accurate perspective is that you’re no longer getting money that you should not have received, to begin with. If your town is getting less, IT’S BECAUSE YOU CAN AFFORD IT. You might not like it. But, the numbers don’t lie.
Each year that your town got ECS money over and above what an accurate ECS formula would have dictated, other students were not getting what they needed. Access to free public education to their equal benefit was not delivered.
I’m not responsible for the education of just the children on my street. I’m not responsible for the education of just the children in my neighborhood. Why is there such a fixation on the idea that we’re responsible for the education of just the children in our town?
When it comes to educating children, every child is our child. Your representative’s job is to make sure that we are doing the best we can to provide an equal, free public education for all our children in Connecticut.
Stop asking your State Representative to “go get your money back”. Stop saying that your ECS money got cut. Think a little bit bigger and a little bit longer term. That kind of thinking is what education can provide.