New London — The Connecticut Association of Boards of Education is playing defense as the 2019 legislative session starts, making sure their concerns are heard when it comes to bills on school safety and special education funding.

For each of these issues, a task force that reports to the General Assembly started meeting in July. CABE's respective positions on these issues are that students acting out shouldn't be removed from the classroom with no supports, and that there are a lot of problems with pooling money for special education.

Overall, CABE Deputy Director and general counsel Patrice McCarthy said, "Solutions generally involve money, and the other solution is no new mandates."

She sat down for more than an hour with The Day editorial board on Tuesday, along with CABE Executive Director Robert Rader and CABE board President Robert Mitchell, who also is chairman of the Montville Board of Education.

In June, then-Gov. Dannel Malloy vetoed a bill that would have created a process for removing a student who violated "daily classroom safety."

"We hear from principals and superintendents that they are seeing more children at a very young age so impacted by the traumas in their lives" that they act out in the classroom, McCarthy said, citing biting and throwing furniture as examples. CABE had opposed the bill, which the organization originally was told would not be moved last session.

A task force, created by legislative mandate to study the issue, involved CABE as well as teacher unions, principals, superintendents, school board members and advocates for special-needs children, who often are the ones getting removed from classrooms. McCarthy feels the report that the task force issued is "certainly an improvement" but still needs work. For example, Mitchell noted that it doesn't address where a student is taken upon removal from the classroom, and Rader has concerns about privacy.

CABE would like to see more mental health professionals and social workers in schools, with Mitchell noting that his goal for Montville is to bring in a second school psychologist.

Last session, the Connecticut School Finance Project drafted a proposal for a Special Education Predictable Cost Cooperative, which would aggregate costs at the state level, where costs are more stable than at the local level.

"We see this as a nightmare, frankly," McCarthy said of the proposal. Her concerns are that it doesn't solve the funding problem, it only provides stability for one year at a time. She said the state doesn't need more bureaucracy, and there's the danger that the state won't keep putting in its share.

Districts are required to put special education students in the least restrictive environment, and depending on a given school's programs, that could mean putting the student in a specialized classroom in-district or sending the student to another district.

The instability of special education costs is an issue all over the country, not just in Connecticut.

Mitchell noted that a few years ago, a family moved from New York to Montville with four students who had outplacements, and the least expensive was $125,000. Rader said that special education costs are now 20 percent to 24 percent of an education budget but special education students make up only 10 percent to 12 percent of a school district's population.

McCarthy is concerned that at some point there will be a clash between parents of special-needs students and the other parents, and "it's not going to be a pretty fight."

CABE has advocated making the burden of proof on the party that's challenging the placement of a special-education student, whereas it is now on the school district.

McCarthy was on the Shared Services Committee that Gov. Ned Lamont put together as part of his transition, and she agreed with some of the committee's recommendations while disagreeing with others. An example of the latter is the idea to give boards of education independent taxing authority.

Pointing to his native Pennsylvania, Mitchell said there are models out there for regionalization but, in Connecticut, "the taxpayers haven't suffered enough to make it happen."

CABE's other legislative priorities include hiring and retaining educators from diverse backgrounds, removing barriers to personalized learning, providing appropriate support for English learners, removing mandates that don't promote student achievement and avoiding the transfer of state mandates to local taxpayers.

e.moser@theday.com