School Spending In CT: Most & Least Equitable Districts + Town-By-Town Breakdown

CONNECTICUT — It's the lightning rod issue every year during school budget negotiations and the voting that follows: Just how much should taxpayers spend on a student's education?

The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated matters, as the COVID-19 pandemic is fond of doing. A report from The Brookings Institution indicates that, nationwide, low-income students have suffered the greatest “learning loss” due to partial or total remote learning.

Connecticut has the 13th least equitable school districts in the U.S. overall, according to a new report from personal finance website WalletHub, although some districts within the state are more fair than others.

To create the rankings, WalletHub analysts first scored Connecticut's 166 school districts based on two metrics: average household income and expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools per pupil. They obtained those stats from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics.

Source: WalletHub

Note: For visual purposes, WalletHub included only the top 7 school districts by enrollment from each category. Rank 1 on the “Expenditures Ranking” means highest expenditures and Rank 1 on “Income Ranking” means lowest income.

For expenditures, for each 1 percent above the state's average, WalletHub removed 1 point from a base score of 50 points for each district. For household income, for each 1 percent above the state's average, they added 1 point to a base score of 50 points for each district. The inverse was true for each 1 percent below the state's average.

The final score for each district was calculated by taking the absolute difference between the score for expenditures and the score for household income. The Somers School District, with an expenditure of $20,087 per student where the average annual household income is $106,305, was deemed "most equitable" with a rank of 1. On the opposite side, the Darien School District came in last: The per-student spend of $23,586 is not much higher than in Somers, but the annual income is a soaring $243,750.