Despite a proposal from the education budget committee of the Danbury City Council to reduce the allocation to the Board of education, the Mayors proposed $227 million budget has been approved by the City Council. 

Many council members voiced concerns that once the overall funding made to the Board of Ed, the Board can't be told how to spend the money.  Some Council members said that if the schools came to the council asking for more money during the year, they would be hard pressed to get a nickel.  There was a late effort to try and take out $100,000 from the budget that is slated for non-union personnel raises, but Council members reiterated that once the money is allocated, or not, the council has no say over how it's used.

Councilwoman Colleen Stanley expressed frustrations that administrators were receiving raises while department heads in city government have gone without raises for years.  She chided the school Administrators for not knowing if textbooks were purchased last year when the budget called for $120,000 and this year are asking for $250,000 for textbooks.  

Councilman Warren Levy said if school officials were just guessing on numbers because of unknown factors like state and federal assistance or health care costs, they should guess a little lower.  He added that he would give them an "F" for budget presentation.

There are still some unknowns in the Danbury education budget, including how much funding is coming from the state.  Mayor Mark Boughton says the Education Cost Sharing formula is unbalanced.  He says the one factor in the Education Cost Sharing formula that helps Danbury, has been taken out.  That's the number of English Language Learnings students in a district partially determining how much funding each municipality gets. 

Boughton says the reason it was taken out was to give West Hartford more money.  He says that's the problem with funding education in the state.

He also wants the legislature to explain why New Britain, the 8th largest city in the state, receives $75 million for education aid while Danbury, the 7th largest, receives just $23 million.  He says the City has more students than New Britain, but gets less than a third of the funding.