State Senate Democrats said they introduced the “Healthy Students, Healthy Schools” Initiative to support the well-being and safety of Connecticut’s students in light of the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yehyun Kim :: CT Mirror
Senator Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, discusses broad agenda to combat systemic racism during a June 2020 press conference a few weeks after the murder of George Floyd.
A few weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police one year ago, progressive Democrats in Connecticut demanded massive new investments in poor Black and Latinx communities.
What they got was an overhaul of police accountability rules but almost no dollars. Neither the Black Lives Matter movement nor the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic were enough to overcome moderate Democrats’ and Republicans’ opposition to the tax hikes needed to sustain big spending increases in education, health care, housing and other core services.
“Do you really think that these children who have been exposed to this violence believe that there is a future for them?” asked Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport.
Days after a 3-year-old child and a 16-year-old boy were killed in separate shootings in Hartford, Sens. Marilyn Moore, Gary Winfield and Doug McCrory demanded Wednesday that the state fund community programs that stop cycles of violence and trauma in Connecticut’s cities.
“What we are seeing in our cities is a slow, banal mass killing,” said Winfield, D-New Haven. “And this state is doing almost nothing about it.”
Winfield and other members of the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus rejected the notion that Connecticut doesn’t have enough money to tackle the problem, pointing to President Joe Biden’s proposal to allocate $5 billion to anti-violence groups dedicated to reducing gun violence and to the money that would flow into state coffers if lawmakers vote to legalize marijuana and sports