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Higher standards for teachers.
Jobs.
A better way to evaluate students and their principals.
Jobs.
More money for poorer school districts.
Jobs.
And, the piece de resistance: an end to what is often seen as automatic teacher tenure.
The week including and surrounding the opening of the 2012 legislative session was about education, and a governor’s intent to change the system, to use money and the power of the state to adjust the very basics of how schools operate.
And, in the process, create jobs.
“I see a Connecticut with public schools that are the envy of the nation,” said Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in his State of the State Address Wednesday, a speech with a revivalist aura that spoke specifically of economic revival. And to be sure, the rest of that sentence reads: “- graduating students ready to be hired for those jobs here at home.”
The next weeks will be filled with the wrestling over his intent and the money needed to accomplish his goals.
The budget, and its ripples
As Mirror budget reporter Keith Phaneuf wrote earlier this week, the governor “moved onto the fiscal high wire Wednesday without a net.”
The man has plans – to boost education spending and to bolster state worker pension funds, but the means to do so is not immediately apparent.
Meanwhile, as both Phaneuf and Mirror health reporter Arielle Levin Becker reported in several stories this week, the effects of tightening state budgets and the increasing numbers of vacant state jobs are hurting day-to-day functioning of major state departments.
The Department of Social Services, which regularly deals with some 650,000 residents, is in the midst of a four- to six-year transition to a new computer system. Those who can operate DSS' current antiquated system, based on the prehistoric computer language COBOL, are close to retiring, if they haven't already left state service. Many took advantage of last summer's union concessions deal the governor worked out with state unions.
Without the trained staff to work COBOL, the department is in danger of being unable to service thousands of its clients. Levin Becker quoted the normally understated DSS chief, Rodney Bremby, as saying, "Without the staff to maintain (COBOL) we will truly face a threat to public health, safety and welfare."
In Washington
Connecticut lawmakers got pulled into a politicized church/state debate late in the week, as Mirror Washington correspondent Ana Radelat explained.
President Obama reversed himself Friday on an earlier decision that religion-affiliated institutions, such as schools, hospitals and charities, would have to offer birth control coverage in their health plans. The revised decision was that female employees of these institutions will be able to ask their company's insurers to add that coverage to their policy at no cost.
Obama said that the new policy protects religious liberty by not forcing the affected institutions to offer something the church opposes. As the Catholic Church opposes any form of contraceptives, however, state and national church leaders remained displeased, vowing to study Obama's latest statement.
The state's congressional Democrats praised the president. "I applaud the administration's new rule, which balances First Amendment religious concerns with women's rights and women's health," Rep. Joe Courtney, 2nd District, and a Catholic, said in a statement.
Jenifer Frank
Editor
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