Williams: Legislature’s Democrats Preserve School Security Grants for Putnam, Mansfield, Killingly

Urges state agency, governor to release funding for safety improvements

March 11, 2009 – (RealEstateRama) — Late last month, the General Assembly passed a budget deficit mitigation bill that reduces the state deficit by more than $1.1 billion while at the same time protecting $1.8 million in state funding for school security upgrades. Senate President Pro Tempore Donald E. Williams, Jr. (D-Brooklyn) today lauded the move, but said that many security improvement projects will be cancelled if the administration doesn’t release the grants to the state’s school districts.

“With the state facing a budget crisis, we need to make smart investments with our state’s dollars, and investing in the safety of our schools is a smart move,” said Senator Williams. “Few issues are more fundamental, and we preserved these dollars to make sure that schools and districts with security infrastructure needs will be able to follow through with improvements. Now the grants need to get out the door, and I’m asking Governor Jodi Rell to do just that.”

The competitive grant is part of the S.A.F.E. Schools (Security Assistance for Education) initiative proposed by Senator Williams in 2006 and passed by the General Assembly in 2007. The law was designed to improve safety and security at Connecticut’s public schools and included $10 million in state grants over two years to help schools purchase and install security infrastructure, including surveillance cameras, entryway buzzer systems, scan cards, panic alarms and other systems to improve security.

While Governor M. Jodi Rell proposed elimination of all $5 million set aside for this year, Senate Democrats fought for and preserved $1.8 million for identified priority districts. To date, the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security has not released the allocated grants, which would send state dollars to Killingly, Mansfield and Putnam for improvements.

“For us, we funded this with the grant because we thought it was an important project,” said Putnam Superintendent William Hull, whose district was slated to receive a $52,554 grant for a security camera system at Putnam High School. “Now we have an important project to be funded by the state that can’t go forward.”

Killingly is slated to receive a $65,464 grant for a video surveillance system at Killingly High School, and Mansfield is slated to receive a total of $87,874 for improvements to four district schools — Anne E. Vinton Elementary, Southeast Elementary, Mansfield Middle School and Goodwin Elementary.

According to Killingly Superintendent Dr. William Silver, contracts for the work to install video equipment were executed in good faith, the school district must now use local funding to cover the cost of work already done — work that would be covered by the school safety grant when funds are released.