Face the Facts: Sen. Nuccio says special education is consistently overlooked

State Rep. Tammy Nuccio (R-Tolland) ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, says some of the Democrats' proposal seems excessive, and highlights one area she said in consistently overlooked.

Mike Hydeck: So the majority of Democrats put out a budget on the table this week. Let's talk about your first impressions of it. This is the beginning of the negotiation process.

Tammy Nuccio: Right. Well, I'm a little disheartened, because, you know, it blows through the spending cap by in the end, for both years, it's about $272 million, which is concerning, because some of the parts that are in there are really, I think, excessive and not helpful to, as you said, local education and other priorities that we have in the state.

Mike Hydeck: So moving forward, special education, you're on that committee. That is something that cities and towns have been talking about literally for years now, whether it's the cost of busing, the cost of the programs itself, the fact that we don't have some services in local schools, and kids have to get bused to other places to get these services. How do we start to attack that? That's the committee you're on.

Tammy Nuccio: Well, I think part of it is looking at the rates for these out placements. It's a large portion of anybody's budget, and the state does not fund its piece of it. You mentioned the excess cost, right? So I've been yelling about that on the floor, quite literally. The last couple of years, we've underfunded that by about $100 million a year.

Mike Hydeck: Special education itself?

Tammy Nuccio: Well, the special education excess cost grant formula. So it's the portion that the state pays of the excess cost for special education kids.

Mike Hydeck: Right, so you give a town this amount for your school budget, and then, 'oh, my goodness, special education costs so much more because we have more teachers per pupil, transportation.' So then it's like, 'OK, here's a supplemental amount to help cover the special education costs.' And we've underfunded that?

Tammy Nuccio: We have. And it's a complex formula that we don't want to get into here. But basically the state has cut back its funding, and they have not funded them what they should be funding them. So every year, they get less than they expect, which is hurtful to the local budgets, because they're expecting a certain amount, and then they don't get it, and we just haven't prioritized it at the state. I've raised my hand, I've screamed on the floor and said, you know, we should be spending our money here and not on these other things, but it just gets ignored. It was ignored in the governor's budget, and it's kind of being ignored again in the appropriations budget.

Mike Hydeck: So this special education committee is going to address that. You think it'll help, or is this just pushing paper around?

Tammy Nuccio: Well, I'm not as encouraged as I was with prior years, like the main priority bills. I wanted to see some accountability in it. How do we help prevent children from being classified as special ed? So how do we look for ways to fund Tier II, what we call Tier II interventions.

Mike Hydeck: So what's Tier II? What does that mean?

Tammy Nuccio: So Tier II is like when your child starts to show issues, like they may not be reading as well or speaking as well as other people. So we have this Tier II intervention where you're supposed to have people come in and kind of focus on their problems, kind of help them.

Mike Hydeck: So is that, for people who are parents, is that a para that comes in, a para educator that comes in and helps with reading? Is that another degreed PhD professional that comes in and understands there's, you know, emotional, socio-emotional concerns? Like, how does that work?

Tammy Nuccio: It's more a teacher, so it's not necessarily a para. So it's somebody who can help teach a child how to read in a more individual size. You know, it's not the major classroom. It's intervention from professionals to kind of help get your kid up to speed where they should be.

Mike Hydeck: And adding head count costs money, though, so if you need more people to do that, because more kids are classified that way, that's got to be funded, right?

Tammy Nuccio: But it saves money, right? Because if you do that early enough on, then that child will have a better chance of not actually being classified as special needs.

Mike Hydeck: And needing a bus to go elsewhere.

Tammy Nuccio: Well, that or have much more intensive, you know, it's harder and harder to learn how to read as you get older. You know, it's harder and harder to learn these basics as you get older. So this is kind of a way to help it nip it in the bud in the beginning, and I don't feel like we did enough of that right now in the bill. I'm hopeful that there'll still be negotiations, but I don't think this is a program that we can just throw money at and hope it gets better. I think we have to actively think of, 'how do we help these children earlier on?'

Mike Hydeck: So both in recent weeks here on Face the Facts, the Speaker of the House and the comptroller told me, 'Look, Connecticut needs to prepare for a big reduction in federal funding and Medicaid.' We don't know. It's not 100% done deal. It's not stamped, but the signs are there. What's your thought on that? Do you think people will lose coverage if we don't address that? What do you feel like the big picture is on that?

Tammy Nuccio: Well, I think there's a lot of people running around saying that a lot of things are going to happen when we don't have any indication of what's going to happen. And you know, the state in 2017, that bipartisan legislature really put some good safeguards in place. If the federal administration were to come down and say, We're cutting Medicaid by 10%, it would be detrimental. It would be really bad for the state of Connecticut. But we have a process in place where you would declare an emergency and utilize the funds from the rainy day fund. And at that point, I think we're at $4.5 billion in the rainy day fund. You could fund a 5% cut in Medicaid for 10 years. So I don't think we have to run around and panic yet, because we don't know it. We've done modeling. We've looked at what a 5% cut would be, what a 10% cut would be, and we've looked at what's the feasibility of being able to fund that, and I think we have the cushion to be able to do it without upending everybody's lives.

Mike Hydeck: And full disclosure, you're in finance. That's your profession, so you understand the numbers.