A Personal Note From the Author of “Budget Cuts Hit Small Connecticut Towns Where Students Feel It Most“
I grew up in Berlin, Connecticut, the first generation in my family to attend college and first to obtain a doctorate. My father immigrated to this country from Poland. There was no roadmap for what I was trying to do, no family playbook for navigating college applications, scholarship essays. And there certainly was no money squirreled away to support my big ambitions. What I had was the public school system, and for a stretch of the early 2000s, even that felt uncertain.
When Berlin’s school budget came under pressure, the cuts landed where they always do: on the programs working-class kids depend on most. For a few years, after-school care disappeared. Sports programs shrank. Decreased Advanced Placement opportunities. The activities that kept us engaged, gave us structure, and built the records that scholarship committees eventually read got a major cut when I was in 6th grade. Only families that could afford these programs were able to continue enrollments and activities while these cuts remained.
Fortunately, those programs returned before I hit high school. When they did, I was ready. I threw myself into multiple opportunities the district offered. Those experiences became the foundation of scholarship applications I could not otherwise have assembled. I finished my first year of college before even attending, a vital savings opportunity that made the journey to a doctorate with loans bearable. For a first-generation student from a working-class family, scholarships and loans were not a bonus, they were the only path. That path led me to the University of Connecticut, where I earned my Doctor of Pharmacy degree.
I think about that often now, as I continue to pay off my investment in myself and because the story is not over. I am a working mother and a taxpayer in East Hampton. I juggle a career, a household, and children of my own who are navigating their school years in a state where the same budget pressures I watched as a child are playing out all over again. After-school programs are not a luxury for some families, but an infrastructure. They are how households with two working parents stay employed while a child stays safe, engaged, and on track. With rising childcare costs, inflation and wages that barely keep up, parents depend on their tax dollars to go to services that aid them in staying in the work force. Child care centers such as KOCO and Brightpath provide dedicated after-school programs in East Hampton that include transport to their centers for children from local elementary schools, but full-time monthly rates can average $500 to $600 depending on pick-up needs.
When I pay my taxes, I am not writing a check to an abstraction. I am investing in the system to do for my children what it once did for me: provide structure, opportunity, and the kind of documented achievement that opens doors. Cut those programs and you do not just inconvenience working parents. You remove the ladder that some kids, especially kids without inherited advantage, need to reach any kind of future at all.
I did not write this article as a distant observer. I wrote it as someone who has been on both sides of this equation, as a child who needed the public investment, and as a working mother and taxpayer who is making it. The stakes are not abstract to me.