HARTFORD, Conn. — A new report identifying Connecticut as one of the most segregated states in the country did not surprise state lawmakers, educators and local leaders.

In fact, it solidified what they have known about the state for many decades.

Economic and racial segregation in schools resulted from a history of discriminatory housing policies that created segregated borders, both along racial and economic lines, experts say. Further, the formation of school districts were based on town borders within segregated towns, resulting in segregated districts.

Lawmakers and educators have long mulled the idea of regionalizing school districts and reforming the Education Cost Sharing formula to make funding more equitable between school districts, but progress has been frustrated.

There was fierce opposition to legislation around regionalization in 2019, and while several changes have been made to the ECS formula, which dictates the distribution of $2.4 billion in state education funding to public school districts, local education experts said that reforms are still needed.

Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said for a year or longer he has consistently said that “Connecticut has both the distinction of having among the most expensive forms of education in the country and among the least equitable forms of education.

“So it’s a decision that we make year after year when we accept a system in which education is funded primarily by local municipalities and issues of poverty, of multiple languages, of special education are not taken into consideration or adequately addressed in that formula,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s not about any one town or municipality. It’s about kids and whether we are OK with a system in which the zip code you’re born into determines a level of opportunity you’re able to have access to.”

Sen. Gary Winfield, a New Haven Democrat, who is vice chair of the state’s Education Committee, said the report on segregation makes a statement but it is not a revelation.

“I guess what it really calls into question is our commitment to not being in this position,” Winfield said. “We haven’t really tackled that issue. We haven’t said what is inherent in this issue is not just whether Black kids sit next to white kids in school, which is what (Sheff v. O’Neill) allowed us to do, but whether or not all of the schools are places we want to be, whether or not there are opportunities to live beyond the places where you would expect to find Black and brown folks.”

The 1989 landmark Sheff v. O’Neill case aimed to address the disparity in education between Hartford students and their suburban peers by offering students an alternative to the city’s failing schools, creating both the Open Choice program to bus Hartford students to suburban schools and the CREC magnet schools.

While state-of-the-art magnet schools were built and funded with state and Hartford Public School dollars, resources at the city’s schools dwindled, diminishing the educational opportunities available to those students who chose to remain in Hartford or were unable to secure a lottery placement.

Winfield said people are experiencing segregation and “with segregation comes inequality.”

Cathryn Vaulman, director of communications for Gov. Ned Lamont, said the governor “is deeply concerned about equity in education and takes seriously the state’s role in reducing disparities in our schools.

“Every child in Connecticut deserves a high-quality education, regardless of where they live,” she said.

She said the governor’s newly formed Blue-Ribbon Commission on K-12 Funding and Accountability “is tasked with ensuring state education funds are distributed equitably and focused on ensuring each student in each school has the resources they need to succeed.”

States of segregation

Brown’s Promise, in collaboration with the Segregation Tracking Project, released its first report ranking levels of racial and economic segregation in public schools in all states.

Using data from the 2023-24 school year, the report highlighted “high levels of racial segregation between white students and their Black, Hispanic and Native American peers and economic segregation between students who qualify for Free and Reduced lunch — a measure of poverty, and those who don’t,” according to a release on the report.

The state ranked sixth in the country for the most economically segregated schools and 11th for the most racially segregated, according to the report.

By contrast, Kansas, the center of the landmark 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education ruling, is ranked 26th in economic segregation and 26th in racial segregation.

Connecticut was also ranked third worst in the country for “poverty packing,” denoting concentrated poverty alongside wealthier areas that are separated by school or district boundaries.

Stephen Owens, director of policy and advocacy for Brown’s Promise, said an important highlight of the report related to Connecticut and that the vast majority of segregation is happening across district lines.

“But if every school in that district is in high poverty they don’t really have the ability to deconcentrate that poverty on their own,” he said. “In Hartford, no amount of moving kids around in that district would integrate the schools. There would need to be some integration or partnership with other districts.”

Owens said public education really began in the United States, “in the Connecticuts and Massachusetts of the world through local towns and municipalities.

“But that does allow for residential segregation, which we see everywhere,” he said. “Versus a state like Florida, a huge state that also has income inequality, but also poor neighborhoods and rich towns right next to each other. But because their districts are countywide, they have some of the lowest segregation in the nation.”

Owens said there has to be a way to “provide local ownership to create high quality schools across lines of difference and support the schools where that’s not a possibility, where you might have schools that remain in poverty.”

‘Until we address housing there is always going to be a struggle’

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, a civil rights activist and named plaintiff in the Sheff V. O’Neill case, said the report mentions Sheff as a model of a possible remedy.

Sheff serves on the advisory board of Brown’s Promise.

Further, Sheff said she has been saying for 36 years that the state needs regional school systems to achieve integration.

She noted 18 regional school systems already exist in the state, mostly in wealthy, white rural areas.

“The regional school system exists in white enclaves,” she said. “That’s OK for Connecticut. But when you start talking about regional school districts that open up diversity and integration, there’s a problem with that?”

And she said further that “until we address housing there is always going to be a struggle to have integrated school systems.”

Preston Green, John and Maria Neag Professor of Urban Education at University of Connecticut and an expert on school desegregation, published a study concluding a relationship between school segregation and insufficient funding for Black and Latino students in seven cities including Hartford.

The report summarizes the history of segregated housing policies that excluded Black families from majority white areas, Green said.

For example, he said, in 1924 West Hartford was the first Connecticut town to enact zoning regulations barring construction of multifamily homes.

“This effectively prevented Black and Hispanic families, largely unable to afford single-family homes, from moving to the area, keeping it white,” the report said. He added that redlining also occurred, resulting in Black people congregating in East Hartford.

Addressing housing, Vaulman said “long-standing, structural challenges in the Connecticut housing market, combined with the municipal approach to districting in the state, contribute to the data seen in this report.

“That is why Governor Lamont has focused on reducing barriers to increasing the housing supply and prioritizing affordable housing,” she said. Lamont in 2025 vetoed a housing bill designed to increase affordable housing after heavy lobbying from suburban officials. He signed a revised bill that allowed towns to retain more local control after a special session.

She said since 2019 the state has completed construction on 14,800 housing units — utilizing $835 million in state investment and $3.2 billion in total public-private capital.

The Connecticut Mirror reported that 8,000 units of those were renovations, not new construction, and that 43% of all completed units were in the five largest cities — Bridgeport, Stamford, New Haven, Hartford and Waterbury, potentially reinforcing racial and economic segregation. “Ninety-eight towns had completed no affordable housing units.”

While Sheff credited Sheff v. O’Neill with providing educational opportunities for students, Carol Gale, president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, said voluntary desegregation has not solved education inequity, which she called a structural problem.

“The problem in Connecticut is that we do not regionalize our educational system,” Gale said. “That is the only way we would ever truly stop this problem of being so segregated.”

She said that each school district’s reliance on property tax funding from their municipality “inherently structurally is going to create gross disparities in the amount of money each town can provide.

“So we have our wealthy towns with plenty of money and then we have our poor towns that struggle,” she said.

She said wealthy towns do not want to hear that the only answer is a regional approach to education.

Referring to “poverty packing,” Gale said she has seen how students struggle who don’t have the same access to experiences, vacations, books, clothing and food, reflecting a whole myriad of problems that occur when there are not enough financial resources to take care of one’s basic needs.

Rep. Corey Paris, a Stamford Democrat and co-chair of the Children’s Committee, said he came to the state from Kansas.

“I didn’t expect to spend my career fighting the same fight in a state that thinks it already won it,” he said. “What’s left for us is the will to actually accept the challenge to correct this. We need to be funding schools by need. We need to stop pretending that a child’s zip code is destiny. And none of this is permanent because there are imaginary lines that we have drawn, which means we can redraw them.”

67 school boards, 67 counties

Lake County, an A-rated school district 45 miles north of Orlando, is one of 67 counties in Florida, which organizes regionalized school districts by county.

Bill Mathias, chair of the Lake County Board of Education, said there are 47 schools in the county and that the communities are more integrated than other areas.

He said what makes the state unique is its open enrollment law which allows any student to enroll in a school anywhere in the county. The law puts schools on a more event playing field and deters “poverty packing.”

“And from a standpoint of consistency and being able to measure schools across the board, we have 67 counties that are measurable from the Florida Department of Education,” Mathias said. “I could not imagine trying to benchmark 169 school districts.”

Lake County Commissioner Sean Parks said that regionalization means there could be an economy of scale when it comes to cost.

“And the way the districts are set up, I think, promotes more of that lab, if you will, to evaluate better education ideas as opposed to being very micromanaged city by city or small school district by small district,” he said.

‘Completely possible’

Winfield said, “We have to stop talking about what we can’t do and get to work on the things that are completely possible.

“It’s completely possible to get folks to understand why it’s beneficial to them to regionalize,” he said.”We have things that we want to do in a General Assembly. We push in the same direction and they don’t get done in a year. It doesn’t mean we didn’t do them. The things that we don’t do are the things that we don’t think are important enough. We need to focus on regionalization without the expectation that we get something done in a year. Some of the most important things we’ve ever done have taken multiple years.”

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