On Wednesday, Connecticut’s merged School Safety Infrastructure and School Building Projects Advisory councils will meet for the first time. It comes three months after Connecticut Public's Accountability Project found that the infrastructure council was not upholding its legislative mandate.
The infrastructure council was founded in 2013 in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting. The council was supposed to have 11 members who would set guidelines for school design. But in recent years the council was mostly dormant because some council members were not showing up.
“I’m disappointed,” said former state Rep. Andy Fleischmann, who served as House chairman of the Education Committee when the council was initially formed. “There is this natural human tendency to address a problem, and then to assume that you’re done. Right? And I think that that is probably what the state has fallen victim to here.”
While some legislators told us they didn’t know their appointees weren’t showing up, the Department of Administrative services said it wanted to merge the council with the School Building Projects Advisory Council because their work is complementary.
The merged council meets at 10 a.m. Wednesday. Its agenda includes new appointments and discussion of school safety infrastructure criteria.
