The program, which launched in July 2024, invests $3,200 on behalf of babies enrolled in Connecticut’s Medicaid program, HUSKY. More than half the babies born in Connecticut are to mothers on Medicaid, and around 15,600 babies are expected by be enrolled in the program annually. Eligible participants live in every one of the state’s cities and towns.

Connecticut is so far unique in passing sustained, state-level support for the concept, but small experiments are popping up around the country, including one through private philanthropy in Georgia and a temporary program for children in foster care in California who were impacted by COVID. Several other states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, are considering baby bonds-type programs.

The conference kicked off with a conversation between Connecticut State Treasurer Erick Russell and Darrick Hamilton, a professor at The New School and an economist who is credited with helping to create the concept. They discussed Connecticut’s first in the nation program, and how it may be planting the seeds of a national movement.

“We’re building political momentum, we start local,” said Hamilton, who is the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School. “But at the end of the day, to make this come into fruition, we’ve really got to get the federal government involved to ensure that all children of the United States will be able to get into that vehicle of wealth building.”

Russell spoke about his childhood growing up in New Haven, sweeping the floor and working the register after school at his parents’ store. No one he knew as a kid owned their own home and working paycheck to paycheck was a way of life.

Russell said he is trying to end poverty in Connecticut, and baby bonds are but one of many strategies required to achieve that goal.

“We understand that baby bonds, by itself, is not the solution to that problem,” Russell said. “This is a piece to the puzzle as we continue to make key investments in things like education and early child care and bringing down the cost of housing.”

Baby bonds can provide funds for a down payment on a home, money to open a business or pay for school. But officials said the existence of the funds may also help in less obvious ways: baby bonds can encourage a family to imagine a child’s future and plan for it.

The funds could stave off gentrification by creating a cohort of people who are able to cash in at around the same time and even pool resources to support their neighborhood. And they help link parents to state supports through a positive vehicle.

Laura Tillman is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2025 @ CTMirror (ctmirror.org).

In a meeting Tuesday, the committee voted to approve the funding, which will be distributed over the next four years for what’s known as the Housing as Recovery initiative. It’s by far the biggest investment OSAC has made since first convening in March 2023.

At a cost of $14.25 million a year, the initiative will help as many as 500 people annually. That includes vouchers through the state’s Rental Assistance Program and $9,500 per person to cover the cost of trauma-informed case management services, which include treatment programs, budgeting guidance and training for tenants to be successful, from managing responsibilities like security deposits and utilities to understanding their legal rights. Each client will also have $5,000 set aside to ensure they have basic necessities like furniture and utilities. Finally, the committee allocated $400,000 per year for program evaluation.

“This is a really exciting project, it really has implications for helping so many people,” said Nancy Navarretta, OSAC’s co-chair, during the committee’s Tuesday meeting.

The initiative passed with unanimous support from the OSAC’s 53 members.

The size of Tuesday’s funding approval was notable given frustration expressed by advocates as recently as December, when only $21 million in requests had been approved nearly two years after the committee first convened.

Connecticut has a lot of money to spend on this life or death issue. The state has so far received more than $158 million in settlement funds paid by pharmacies and opioid manufacturers following litigation. The state expects to receive $600 million over an 18-year period — and likely more once additional lawsuits are settled. OSAC is tasked with spending that money.

The committee’s decision this week to invest deeply in housing comes during a time when homelessness is on the rise. From 2023 to 2024, Connecticut’s homeless population increased by about 13%. Recent data from providers shows more than 5,000 people are experiencing homelessness.

Homelessness and behavioral health issues including addiction are deeply intertwined. Addiction can cause people to lose their housing, and often worsens when they become homeless.

The committee heard a presentation on the issue in November, its last meeting before Tuesday’s vote.

Alice Minervino, director of housing and homelessness services for the state Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, told the committee stable housing has improved the odds of recovery for people with addictions. She said people experiencing homelessness sometimes use drugs to cope with mental or physical health conditions related to their lack of housing. The department has some existing programs to house people with addiction, but this program would expand those services.

“They have to find a place to go,” Minervino said during the November presentation. “They can spend a lot of time on their feet walking around. There’s also an increased chance of being victimized, being in fights or being attacked, and this increases people’s medical issues, which increases their pain, and if they have a mental health condition, that can increase. So people use substances to try and mitigate those conditions.”

Dr. Gail D’Onofrio, a professor of medicine core addiction at Yale University, said during the meeting that it’s hard to find shelter beds for people with active addictions, particularly opioids.

Most Connecticut shelters don’t have sobriety requirements, but also don’t have the staff to handle people who aren’t following shelter rules because of their addiction, Kara Capone, chief executive at Community Housing Advocates in Hartford, said in an interview.

Service providers have said for years that they’re underfunded, which leaves staff salaries low and makes it hard to recruit and retain employees. “The issue is if somebody is not being cooperative or being combative because of intoxication, then that shelter can’t keep them housed,” Capone said. “It’s a risk to the health and safety of others.”

About a decade ago, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development adopted a policy called rapid rehousing to address homelessness. The concept calls for getting people housed as quickly as possible before addressing underlying issues such as addiction. Connecticut service providers have embraced this housing first approach, Capone said.

OSAC passed two other recommendations on Tuesday, including the expansion of harm reduction centers at a cost of $7 million over a three year period, and a safe use hotline for $1.5 million for three years.

This type of hotline, which would be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, seeks to prevent overdoses by giving people who are using opioids a person to talk to on the phone while they’re administering the drug, so emergency services can be alerted if they overdose. People using alone were identified as having an especially high risk of death in a recent report produced for the OSAC by Yale researchers. People experiencing homelessness are also overrepresented in overdose deaths, according to the report.

Trocchi was optimistic that some of that money might end up funding new services at the Wheeler Clinic, a nonprofit community health group that treats clients with substance abuse disorder at five locations across the state. She was particularly hopeful about funding for two new positions at Wheeler’s Bristol location to do community outreach and support patients in recovery.

But Trocchi says she still hasn’t heard anything about that proposal, or the five others she submitted to the committee, more than a year later.

Several organizations contacted by The Connecticut Mirror, including the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Corporation, the Hartford Public Library, and the Connecticut Chapter of Labor Assistance Professionals, say they also haven’t heard back from the committee. Some are confused by OSAC’s methods for distributing the funds and believe the pace of putting that money to work is worrisomely slow, given the lives at stake. 

“The fact that we are at the year point and we have not received any communication on any of the proposals that were submitted is rather concerning,” Trocchi said. “The longer we wait to hear on next steps and how long until funds will be allocated, the longer we are not delivering these critical services to our communities.”

According to a representative for OSAC, these groups are fundamentally misunderstanding how the committee is considering the plans they submitted. While Trocchi and others believed they were submitting applications and anticipated budgets for specific funding asks, like a peer support specialist or a van, OSAC was instead seeking a wish-list of ideas from nonprofits and private individuals for how the settlement money should be spent.

That list is still being reviewed by subcommittees from OSAC and the Alcohol Policy Drug Council to guide funding decisions. Nancy Navarretta, the commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the co-chair of OSAC, expressed empathy when asked about the frustration some groups say they are feeling.

“It’s not a reflection of the quality of the provider making the recommendations. Of course, people are invested and would love to be funded in whatever organization that they represent, and I can appreciate that,” Navarretta said. But, she added, part of the committee’s mandate is to draw from data and expertise to determine how the money can be best spent to save as many lives as possible, not to fund a laundry list of asks.

So far, OSAC has designated $21 million for spending on 13 different projects since the committee began to meet in March 2023. That is a small fraction of the overall pot of money, which is enormous — $600 million the state will get over an 18-year period, and likely much more once additional lawsuits are settled. As of the group’s November meeting, the state had already received more than $158 million in funds paid by pharmacies and manufacturers of opioids in litigation settlements.

In 2023, 1,338 people died in Connecticut of a drug overdose, according to the state Department of Public Health. Complete data is not yet available for 2024, though numbers were trending slightly below 2023’s figures during the first eight months of this year.

For providers, frustration stems from the reality that people are continuing to die of drug overdoses in Connecticut and that an intense demand for services remains, even as a large pot of money sits in the bank.

At Wheeler, Trocchi said she understood the submissions she made back in 2023 to be applications with concrete requests for funding. But, “at the end of the day, if the department’s understanding was that those were recommendations, the question I still have is, what have they done with those recommendations in the last year?”

Chris McClure, the chief of staff at the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, helped create the committee and the submission process.

“We had to create something from nothing — the bylaws, the subcommittee to write the bylaws, how funding recommendations go in and move through the system, then go out the door,” McClure said. “We didn’t have a great way to keep people updated, and I’ll take ownership of that.”

Spending has been slow due to a variety of factors. First, it took time to actually create the committee, which McClure said had no analog in state government.

The committee is large — its 53 members include state and local officials, public health experts, treatment providers, and people who have lost family and friends to opioid use.

The concepts for harm reduction, prevention, treatment and recovery support systems must first get vetted and approved by subcommittees. The full committee convenes every two months, though subcommittees meet in between. Then, after those projects are approved by the main committee, the Office of Policy and Management and the Attorney General’s Office must determine whether there is sufficient funding, and whether that proposed use — like buying a van to get medication assisted treatment to more people, or the purchase of harm reduction supplies — falls into one of the uses permitted under the terms of the settlement agreement and state statute. In some cases, a bidding process follows.

Many projects never make it past OSAC because of concerns about the dangers of using the settlement funds to create a series of “benefit cliffs,” whereby new projects are launched or positions are temporarily funded, only to see funds dry up, leaving patients and providers in the lurch.

OSAC’s funding priorities were outlined in a March 2024 report. They include increasing access to medication like methadone used to treat opioid use disorder; harm reduction programs that provide medication to treat overdose and supplies like clean syringes; improved data collection; and training for personnel to create more workers in the addiction and recovery field. Recommendations continue to be reviewed and transformed by the subcommittees into project proposals. McClure said he expects around $17 million in spending to be approved in January.

Ultimately, Navarretta said, the proposals that rise to the top use proven methods to provide life saving care. That’s why proposals to provide Medication Assisted Treatment, or to buy naloxone — the medication that be used in the event of an overdose — and other harm reduction supplies have been successful.

Michelle Melendez, who sent in a recommendation on behalf of United Community and Health Services in Norwich, said she understood that OSAC was compiling a wish list of ideas for spending from various stakeholders across the state. She knew that her proposal — to hire a recovery coach and purchase a van — was unlikely to get a simple “yes” from OSAC. Rather, by submitting the request, OSAC would see the need for coaches and transportation in the Norwich area and consider creating a funding stream to address those needs.

McClure said that some of the recommendations have served as inspiration for projects that are currently being funded.

For example, the Hartford Public Library made a request to the committee for naloxone, also known as Narcan, a medication that can be used to save a person’s life in the event of an overdose. A representative from the Hartford Public Library said that OSAC has not funded their request.

However, OSAC did fund a robust supply of naloxone for use across the state in a program called “naloxone saturation,” which put more than $2 million toward the purchase and distribution of 60,000 naloxone kits. That supply is being distributed by DMHAS to hospital emergency departments, municipalities, treatment and recovery support providers and harm reduction organizations, free of charge. So while the Hartford Public Library’s individual request for naloxone was not approved, a larger push to supply naloxone across the state was given the green light. McClure said it’s a supply the library can draw from.

But while those groups can technically benefit from the naloxone supply, the lack of communication from OSAC has still been a roadblock. Jason Bannon, the chairman of the Connecticut Chapter of Labor Assistance Professionals, said the group asked for funding for naloxone from OSAC, and, after receiving a confirmation that their submission was received by the committee, never heard anything else. Bannon said he was not aware that the committee had funded a naloxone saturation program.

In Hartford, Mark Jenkins, the founder and CEO of the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance, has seen close-up what OSAC funds can do. He runs one of the few nonprofits that has already received a chunk of the settlement funds.

On Albany Avenue, a syringe exchange program run through the Alliance has been buoyed by OSAC funding since June. OSAC gave $260,000 to the group to purchase syringes, sterile water packets — to reduce the possibility of infection during injection — and alcohol wipes. While the group had offered the syringe exchange program for some time, funding had dried up. The money from OSAC has allowed clients to continue to walk into the group’s locations and exchange used syringes for clean ones, keeping them safe from HIV and Hepatitis C.

In early December, clients at the alliance walked in with used syringes and dropped them into a medical waste container. A staff member wrote down the number of used syringes, how many clean ones each client took, and what other harm reduction supplies they received, from condoms to antibiotic ointment. Larger sharps containers in a nearby closet were filled with used syringes, ready to be shipped off to a medical waste company.

Jenkins, too, is frustrated with the pace at which the money is being distributed, precisely because he sees the life and death stakes every day.

One wall of the small front room was covered in more than a hundred photos, the faces of people the alliance has served — young, old, housed, unhoused, Black, white, brown — since the group was founded 10 years ago. Jenkins, a recovered addict, was standing next to them in many of the images.

Jenkins’ finger traveled from face to face, remembering nicknames.

“God bless Buster,” Jenkins said, his voice booming, then laughing at some mental image of Buster. The iconoclast who slept in his truck. A street artist who bristled against society’s rules.

Then he pointed to Walter, who improbably retained a joyful disposition despite years of struggling to get clean. Walter and Buster — and half of the other faces on that wall — are dead now.

“I could double this wall,” Jenkins said.

Once the clients had their supply of clean syringes, some of them grabbed a fruit cup and a sandwich and walked into the winter morning. Maybe, with these supplies in hand, Jenkins would see them again.

Jenkins turned his face from the wall of photos and pushed the tears away. When the words came they were quiet.

“It takes a toll,” he said.

Laura Tillman is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (ctmirror.org). Copyright 2025 © The Connecticut Mirror.

According to Feeding America, one in eight residents is food insecure. That includes one in six children and one in four Black and Hispanic residents. Inflation and housing prices have compounded since the COVID pandemic, pushing more people to seek supplemental food.

During the pandemic, the federal government was pitching in. The state’s largest food bank, Connecticut Foodshare, received supplemental food from the American Rescue Plan Act and the Farmers to Families Food Box program. But now, those sources have dried up, yet demand for food is still sky-high. And the state pitches in only a tiny amount: some $1 million during fiscal years 2023 and 2024. Historically, food pantries have raised private funds and they’ve held food drives for shelf-stable cans and boxes at schools and churches.

But they’re also turning to increasingly creative methods to fill the gap between supply and demand. They are harnessing the power of nature, community and technology to get healthier, more abundant food to more people.

Food forest

Behind an apartment building on a major thoroughfare in Hartford’s South End, you’ll find one of these experiments. Here, the Chrysalis Center is cultivating a two-acre plot of land — Hartford’s first “food forest.” More than a community garden, a food forest is a multilayer canopy of trees, shrubs and plants — even mycelium— that mimics the give-and-take of a naturally occurring ecosystem.

Food forests don’t have to be big or densely wooded. The Chrysalis food forest is about the size of a pocket park, sandwiched by residential housing. The building directly in front of the lot is also owned by Chrysalis and houses six young adults and 18 veterans, all of whom are otherwise at risk of homelessness.

In the back of the lot, there are some large, established trees. In the front, 30 raised garden beds were thick with vegetables in late summer, and rows of blueberries and fruit tree saplings aspire to eventually contribute more food. They were planning to harvest sap from red maple trees for syrup, and in the shade of those trees, a pile of logs had been inoculated with spores so that edible mushrooms could sprout.

Urban farmer Sean Bodnar says that the project is still in its infancy. Bodnar’s goal for 2024 was to harvest 3,000 pounds of food from the forest. It’s “a small drop in the bucket” for now, but he expects that poundage will grow each year.

Vegetables and fruit are sold at the Chrysalis-run farmer’s market, which accepts and doubles SNAP dollars. Some produce is distributed to clients at the group’s food pantry and its catering kitchen, which offers job training in food service. Local schools also benefit.

Even within Chrysalis’ headquarters, you’ll find food growing: two hydroponics rooms in the basement are packed with lettuce, tomatoes and peppers, plants that flourish all winter long under grow lights.

Chrysalis has also formed partnerships with grocery chains like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to supply its food pantry, Freshplace. Instead of a traditional pantry model, which helps clients for an undefined period, Freshplace participants receive the assistance of a case manager and a fixed membership term: households can join for only 18 months and must author a “Fresh Start Plan.” During that time, enrolled members receive case management services from social workers in addition to food and together create the plan.

“It’s not just a hand out, it’s a hand up,” Chrysalis Chief of Staff Judy Gough said. Families are triaged to see what they need to become food secure — whether it’s an employment or educational opportunity, or to get out of debt or find housing. Then, Chrysalis works to get them enrolled in a GED program, helps them book a job interview, works on helping them get out of debt or find housing.

Food swamp

Another Hartford group is finding a middle ground between donated and full-price food. At Grocery on Broad, clients can shop in a typical-looking grocery store, but for a discounted price. Depending on their income, that can be 25% to 50% off of products like fruit, cereal, meat and dairy.

“Food desert,” a term describing an area where there are few fresh food options and no grocery stores within reach, has become a relatively familiar term in the discourse about food access. Ben Dubow says the Frog Hollow neighborhood of Hartford is instead a “food swamp.” Yes, there are stores selling food, but what’s on offer tends to be of low quality, and fresh options come at elevated prices.

Grocery on Broad was created to bring greater access into that “swamp,” and it’s also open to the general public, who may be searching for a better quality grocery store in their neighborhood. Anyone can get a 3% discount just for signing up. Dubow says he does most of his own shopping there.

“We’re not here to replace traditional pantries, but rather we think this is a good supplement around traditional food and healthy food,” Dubow said. “We think it’s part of the solution, it’s not the whole solution.”

To the rescue

In Litchfield County, Colleen Stradtman pulled up in a small SUV in September to pick up produce grown at Judea Garden in the town of Washington. Outfitted in a T-shirt that read ‘Food Rescue US,’ Stradtman was retrieving some precious cargo: flats of vegetables destined for a community kitchen in Litchfield.

Stradtman is just one of Food Rescue’s workers at 43 sites around the country. Founded in 2011 in Stamford, the group rallies volunteers and employees to quickly retrieve food that would otherwise go to waste then rush that food to people in need, mainly via food pantries and community kitchens, before it spoils. That might mean picking up 10 trays of hors d’oeuvres from a catering company when a groom gets cold feet, or rerouting a massive order of blemished produce that was destined for the shelves of a grocery store.

That day in September, Stradtman made stops at a Stop & Shop in Torrington, a small warehouse where local farmers deliver their produce, and Judea Garden. She brought food to a Salvation Army pantry and a community kitchen.

Some loads are small — Stradtman can handle them in her SUV. Others are massive, like the cancellations by big box stores of truckloads of fruit, cancellations that are “freakishly common,” according to James Hart, director of development at Food Rescue US. The quantities can be mind-boggling — a trucker calling up with 38,000 pounds of peaches, for example, when a grocery store chain cancels an order, who faces the prospect of unloading that perfectly edible food into a dump.

Food Rescue provides the logistics and manpower to solve that problem. The group can store those peaches and divide them up among a large group of pantries, since no single location would have the capacity to distribute them before they rot. In the process, Food Rescue is helping to support one of the most challenging missions of modern food pantries: providing clients with fresh produce and protein to supplement the shelf-stable items that are so often donated.

Years ago, Stradtman was going through a divorce. The floor fell out from under her and her children. She had family in the area but at first she turned elsewhere.

“You’re reluctant to reach out. You’re reluctant to say, ‘I’m struggling right now.’ So the first line of defense is to go to the agencies in the area and ask, ‘Is there anything you can do to help just get me through this rough patch?’” Those agencies were there for her. “I could carry on without shame. My kids had no idea, and to this day they have no idea.”

A few months later, Stradtman got a new job, and she stopped relying on those agencies. Today, as a food rescuer, she gives back to people who might find themselves in a similar situation.

“You go to bed at night knowing you did good today.”

Minding the gaps

Some Connecticut organizations are trying to get food to people beyond brick and mortar distribution sites. Mobile pantries have become a lifeline for people living in areas of the state where they may not otherwise have easy access to a pantry. Connecticut Foodshare runs 113 mobile pantries throughout the state, setting up in a farmer’s market-style where clients can select the items they want.

The Stamford-based Person 2 Person food pantry also brings refrigerated trucks to local neighborhoods each week with English and Spanish speaking staff. There, shoppers not only get food but can also be connected to the nonprofit’s wraparound services, like domestic violence and mental health providers.

Filling in the Blanks,  a nonprofit based in Norwalk, seeks to address the weekend gap that leaves some children hungry between school-provided meals. On Fridays, the group provides bags of snacks and easy-to-make meals, which are distributed directly to kids at school. Those bags are packed to fit easily into backpacks and can be prepared with minimal cooking supplies. The group now serves children in 11 towns in Connecticut and three in New York.

Editor’s note: This is the second in an occasional Mirror series on food insecurity. While reporting the first story about food pantries in Connecticut, examples were encoun of innovation and ingenuity in attempts to get better quality food to more people in need. This story highlights some of those efforts.

Have a food insecurity story you think should be explored in this series? Write to ltillman@ctmirror.org.

Laura Tillman is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.

The OCA began conducting audits of conditions of confinement for incarcerated youth following a 2016 change in state law, which directed the office to keep tabs on the issue. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice launched its own investigation into the Manson Youth Institute in Cheshire — which is the subject of the OCA’s report, along with the York Correctional Institution for women in Niantic — and found that youth were subjected to isolation, and deprived of mental health care and special education services.

The new report is the fourth OCA audit since 2019, and focuses on youth age 15 to 17-years-old in the custody of the Department of Correction. Acting Child Advocate Christina Ghio said a report on 18 to 21-year-olds will soon follow.

The OCA found that some improvements at Manson and York had been made since its previous audit: there is more mental health programming available than in previous years, and when disciplinary confinement occurs, the duration tends to be shorter. But in other areas, conditions actually grew worse in 2024 compared to 2023, like the number of instances in which isolation and pepper spray were used.

Ghio said in an interview this week that the challenge when it comes to incarcerated youth is balancing the need to rehabilitate individuals who have often experienced significant trauma and have not yet reached adulthood, with the fact that they are being incarcerated as a punitive measure.

“How do we provide a system that does provide accountability, but also focuses on treatment and rehabilitation and meeting the needs of the kids so that they can return to their communities and be able to engage with their communities?” Ghio said.

“We need to be cognizant of the fact that even though they have been accused of committing crimes that can bring them into the adult justice system, they are still youths developmentally, and everything they experience while they’re incarcerated is going to impact their development.”

That includes the need to continue attending school. Incarcerated youth do continue to attend classes inside of the facilities. But the report notes a high rate of teacher absenteeism at Manson Youth Institute, and recommends hiring substitute teachers. Currently, when a teacher is out, Ghio says that youth simply miss out on learning.

The report also criticizes the way that the rating system used by the Department of Corrections classifies youth mental health needs. Many youth are classified by the department as not needing individual mental health services, according to the report. But when the OCA conducted a review of those cases, they found that many likely did need such services, due to histories of trauma and past mental health treatment.

Therapeutic groups are offered to all male youths incarcerated, though many do not participate. That’s why the report suggests that an altogether different model is needed, one that looks more like a rehabilitation center than a prison.

“These are kids who have significant trauma histories, and so our view is that they should instead provide a therapeutic milieu where everybody gets treatment,” Ghio said.

The report also highlights the use of pepper spray. While in 2022, 23 youth at Manson were subjected to pepper spray, this number declined to nine in 2023. In 2024, that number shot back up to 26. All of the youth subjected to pepper spray in 2024 were Black and Hispanic. Often, Ghio said, pepper spray is used when there are fights between youth.

Ghio said it was not clear why there were more pepper spray incidents in 2024 compared to 2023, but emphasized that changing the nature of the environment and increasing therapeutic activities would likely result in a decline in fighting, and therefore a decline in the use of such measures.

While the report does include some findings about the York Correctional Institution, where female incarcerated youth are placed, there are only a few individuals there and trends are not as clear. Group sessions, for example, are not possible at York since there is often only one girl incarcerated at a time.

The report includes a written response from the state Department of Correction and Department of Education.

The DOC response highlights the shift in how isolation occurs, from an approach referred to as Confinement to Quarters (CTQ) to the Reflection Accountability Mediation Program (RAMP), a form of isolation which allows incarcerated youth to continue to participate in school and visitation. The DOC also contends that more mental health services are occurring than were captured by the OCA.

“DOC disagrees that we are underestimating the needs of the juvenile population and it is not clear from the OCA report how they came to that conclusion. We provide mental health services to the entire juvenile population regardless of mental health need score. These interactions may not always be documented within the health record, however, the interactions and conversations are occurring.”

The agency also responded to the OCA’s finding about pepper spray.

“The Department of Correction continues efforts to reduce the use of cell confinement and chemical agent when managing incarcerated juvenile. … The agency conducts thorough reviews of incidents involving the use of chemical agent and continues to train staff on the use of other interventions where possible and chemical agent usage has decreased.”

Christina Quantara, the executive director of the Connecticut Justice Alliance, said that the report highlights the need for children to be taken out of adult prisons.

“Putting a child in an adult prison doesn’t impose the kind of consequences people think it does, and it only creates more trauma and harm,” Quantara said. Quantara added that most of the youth in such facilities have not yet been found guilty but are being held pre-trial.

No one asked her to sign her child in at drop-off during a Bethany Parks and Recreation-run camp during spring break. Instead, she said she watched her kindergarten-age daughter wander into the building alone, without an adult stationed at the door to greet her.

“I had a gut feeling,” said Pagonis, “but when it’s your child care option, you put your trust in the town and the people running it to do the job that’s expected.”

Another local mom, Jeanette Savo, also questioned the way Bethany’s municipal programs were run, especially after her son was allegedly injured by another child and staff seemed hesitant to write up a report. Another day, she stopped by to speak with the department’s assistant director and said she found him napping on the job. But Savo needed the after school care provided by Bethany Parks and Rec.

“You might ask, why did I send my kid there?” Savo said, “But there was no other choice, really.” Pricier child care was out of the question.

Until this spring, mixed reviews of Parks and Rec from moms like Savo and Pagonis were little more than a mundane reality in Bethany, talked about on the playground. The programs were economical and convenient, a lifesaver for working parents. They were a social place for kids to play instead of sitting in front of screens.

But in May and then again in June, Anthony Mastrangelo, a longtime counselor in the summer camps and after-school programs and a substitute teacher at the elementary school, was charged with two counts of first-degree sexual assault, four counts of illegal sexual contact, five counts of fourth-degree sexual assault and one count of risk of injury to a minor. Most of those alleged crimes are said to have occurred during Bethany Parks and Rec programs.

The case is raising anguished second-guessing in Bethany. Parents and former staff are looking back at complaints about how the municipal programs were run, wondering whether lax rules and poor supervision of both staff and children might have created an environment where such alleged abuse could thrive.

They’re also asking why it took police so long to make an arrest — over a year after the first allegations were reported, during which time another girl said she was abused. They want to know whether their first selectwoman, Paula Cofrancesco, did enough to protect local children, given her friendship with the alleged perpetrator and his family, and with Parks and Rec leadership — Cofrancesco’s nephew and cousin.

But the case has implications that go far beyond Bethany.

Connecticut law allows municipal programs for children to operate with no state regulation or oversight, in contrast to programs run by private companies and nonprofits, which must be licensed by the state. Municipal programs instead fall under the umbrella of their local governments, which set their own standards — like whether counselors receive background checks or whether water quality is tested.

Some parents and state officials say the case demonstrates that municipalities, which vary widely in size, resources and personnel, are not qualified to ensure the safety of such programs and shouldn’t be able to set standards themselves.

Other legislators and those representing municipal programs elsewhere in the state argue that such regulation would not have prevented what allegedly happened in Bethany, that the case is the unfortunate result of one alleged bad actor, and that requiring these programs to be licensed would potentially increase their costs and therefore hurt working parents who depend on the services.

But all seem to agree the Bethany case should spur some regulatory changes regarding mandated reporter training and background checks.

At least in Bethany, details that once seemed minor — from campers allowed to spend time unsupervised to lapses in legally required mandated reporter training — have become suddenly consequential.

Small town

The first alleged victim in Bethany, a girl less than 10 years old, came forward in December 2022. During her interview with police and forensic experts at the Yale Family Advocacy Center, she identified three other female victims. Those three girls were interviewed at Yale as well.

Mastrangelo, now 25, was also a substitute teacher at the Bethany Community School. When school officials learned of the charges against him, Mastrangelo was removed from his work with children there. School superintendent Kai Byrd declined a request to be interviewed for this story. Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families launched an investigation, as did the state trooper assigned to Bethany at the time, Ewerton Gouveia.

Though Mastrangelo was also removed from his work with children at Parks and Rec in December 2022, according to a statement released by Cofrancesco this summer, he remained employed in an administrative role for months, working from town hall. According to his personnel file, he was terminated in June 2023. His initial hire date is listed as August 2015.

Bethany is a small town of around 5,500 people, and the Parks and Rec facilities, town hall and elementary school all sit side by side on a small campus. Mastrangelo remained in relatively close proximity to children even after he was removed from working with children (at a town meeting, Cofrancesco, the first selectwoman, said Mastrangelo was cleaning out a closet during this time).

For well over a year after the initial allegations were made and police conducted interviews, according to the warrants, there was no arrest, and police haven’t explained the delay.

“Investigations which may be complex or have many moving parts take time to investigate, whether that be to gather evidence, interview witnesses, or analyze forensic data,” State Police wrote in response to questions about the delay from The Connecticut Mirror. “The process may involve collaboration with various specialists and law enforcement agencies to piece together the puzzle.”

Meanwhile, most people in Bethany were unaware of the case. Amy Lestinsky said that was the case for her as well, despite being heavily involved in town affairs.

As of May 2024, Lestinsky sat on the Board of Education and the Parks and Rec commission, and she was a member of the Republican Town Committee, the party Cofrancesco represents. Lestinsky’s children knew Mastrangelo through Parks and Rec programs, and she often employed him as a babysitter.

For a school assignment, Lestinsky’s daughter once made a list of trusted adults, putting “my babysitter Anthony” first — above her parents. But, in May, Lestinsky said her daughter told her Mastrangelo had allegedly sexually assaulted her the previous night. Lestinsky quickly went to the state trooper then assigned to the town, identified in the warrant as Trooper Ryan Piccirillo.

Lestinsky’s daughter was interviewed by police and experts with the forensics team at the Yale Family Advocacy Center, and Lestinsky learned about the four other cases. When Lestinsky found out how long ago those accusations had been made — 17 months prior, with no arrest made — she was furious.

“My child would have been spared if something had been done, so it has been my plight since this all broke to be vocal,” Lestinsky said. “I know there are people in this town that don’t agree with it, but they’re not in my shoes.”

Lestinsky said she carefully considered her decision to go public with the accusations and has spoken to multiple media outlets before speaking with the CT Mirror.

Lestinsky said she followed up constantly with police, and on May 24, a warrant for Mastrangelo’s arrest was issued for sexual assault in the first and fourth degrees, and risk of injury to a minor. He was released on bond and arrested again in June, this time charged with risk of injury to a minor, first- and fourth-degree sexual assault, and illegal sexual contact. He is currently out on bail and has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

Since Mastrangelo’s arrest, the Office of the Child Advocate launched an investigation into the matter, and the Office of Early Childhood is looking at the case as a possible sign that state regulation of municipal programs for children is needed.

‘Put Kids First’

The allegations have turned the town of Bethany upside down. Town meetings have become crowded forums where tears and recriminations erupt, much of the anger directed at Cofrancesco. Cofrancesco has refused to step down, despite many town residents demanding she do so. There is no legal mechanism to remove her.

Some households have put yellow and black signs on their lawns reading, “Put Kids First, Paula Time to Go.” Naomi Rosenstein, who lives directly across the street from the first selectman, has three signs in her front yard. She’s even positioned one of them above a light, so the message is waiting for Cofrancesco if she comes home after dark.

Cofrancesco has acknowledged that she was friendly with the family of the accused, particularly his mother, who was also a part-time secretary at the local elementary school. Before the accusations came to public attention, Cofrancesco posted photos on social media of herself with her own family and the accused during a vacation at Lake George in the summer of 2023, wearing matching blue T-shirts. After Mastrangelo lost his job at Parks and Rec, Cofrancesco publicly acknowledged that her husband’s insurance company hired him.

Cofrancesco has repeatedly said that while she was aware that there were allegations made against Mastrangelo that prohibited him from being around children, she wasn’t aware that they were sexual in nature. Some residents say they don’t believe Cofrancesco, given her relationship with Mastrangelo’s family, her acknowledgement that she was aware that he had been removed from working with children, and that both of the top directors of the Parks and Rec program at the time are her own relatives — former Parks and Rec director Janice Howard is related through marriage, and former assistant director Anthony Cofrancesco is her nephew.

In her role as first selectwoman, Cofrancesco is technically the town’s chief of police, according to Dave Merriam, the administrative lieutenant in Bethany. Bethany’s previous first selectman, Derrlyn Gorski, a Democrat, says she frequently met with the town’s assigned state trooper during her 16 years in the role and was kept apprised of ongoing cases. Though the trooper assigned to that role changed periodically, that didn’t affect the regularity of her meetings, she said.

“If the cops weren’t doing anything, she should have been on the phone,” demanding action, Gorski said. “I don’t understand how she could have not known.”

Asked through Bethany’s town attorney, Vincent Marino, if she had regrets about her handling of the matter, Cofrancesco did not acknowledge any, responding instead that, “there were no complaints from anyone about the Parks and Recreation Department’s operation or its staff. There was no indication that there was an alleged predator amongst us.”

Cofrancesco wrote she will always feel pain in her soul for “what the children claimed happened to them.” She has said that the community should “move on,” including during a Board of Selectmen meeting on Sept. 19, when she had a heated exchange with Gina Texeira, also a selectwoman in Bethany.

“We’ve belabored things way too long. I’m tired of lollygagging, stonewalling, we’ve gotta move,” Cofrancesco said. “It breaks my heart that what (allegedly) happened happened. It happened, we moved on. We do the best we can and here we are. But stuff has to move on, we’re just not moving forward, we’re stuck in a quagmire, and I’m tired of it.”

Texeira interjected, “I’m just sitting here in shock that you could say that you’ve moved on. Well, some people in town have not moved on, and I just want to say that for them.”

Moving past the issue seems to be a far-off prospect for Bethany. The town has hired an independent law firm to conduct an investigation into how the matter was handled, in addition to the investigation underway by the Office of the Child Advocate and the ongoing criminal case against Mastrangelo.

The Parks and Rec department abruptly closed at the end of the summer, leaving 46 children without after school care, a crisis averted when an arrangement was made with a nearby Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge to accept children into its aftercare program. Bethany taxpayers will foot the bill for the difference in cost, according to Marino. Bethany has since reconvened its Parks and Rec Commission and has scheduled a youth basketball program this winter. Whether Bethany will eventually relaunch its aftercare program remains to be seen.

Disciplinary fallout grips rural CT town in alleged child sex abuse scandal

And, in September, nine members of the Bethany Republican Town Committee resigned — members of Cofrancesco’s own party.

Locals have also expressed concern that the case will have an economic impact on Bethany residents, if families of the alleged victims sue the town. And, given the nature of media attention, locals say they’re worried the case will impact real estate values.

Licensing Exception

The case also has implications that go beyond this small community. Unlike programs for children operated by private companies and nonprofits, in Connecticut there’s no state-level authority that licenses municipal camps, checks up on them or investigates complaints. Rather, municipal programs are under the jurisdiction of each of the state’s 169 local governments, which vary widely in size and complexity. (A small fraction of municipal camps that receive federal Care 4 Kids funding do receive some oversight).

“We think licensing is a good thing,” said Beth Bye, the commissioner of the Office of Early Childhood, which is responsible for licensing and investigating non-municipal summer camps in Connecticut. “Unfortunately, this incident brings to the fore that there are bad actors out there.”

Many parents who send their children to municipal camps may not realize that the state does not require these programs to comply with the same health and safety checks as licensed camps. Those requirements include background checks on camp staff, water quality tests, and proof that staff are trained to lead potentially dangerous programs like firing ranges or archery classes. Lifeguards at licensed camps must be certified, there must be a certain number of bathrooms depending on the number of campers, and there has to be adequate staffing to ensure the supervision of children, according to specific state ratios of staff to children. While many municipal camps likely require those measures, they are under no legal obligation to do so.

But legislative attempts to license municipal camps have received overwhelming opposition from towns across Connecticut, and from groups like the Connecticut Parks and Recreation Association. A bill brought before the Children’s Committee in 2023 that attempted to regulate camps died after dozens of Parks and Rec directors submitted statements of opposition.

Among those letters is statement from Cofrancesco, who wrote that licensing municipal programs would prove too costly and create too much paperwork, arguing that municipal oversight was sufficient.

This kind of opposition has been raised every time the Children’s Committee tries to make incremental progress on the issue, according to committee co-chair Rep. Liz Linehan, D-Cheshire. Even legislation that would require municipalities to post safety reports about programs for children on their own websites has been loudly opposed.

“I can tell you what they tell us,” Linehan said. “What they tell us is that they believe this is a creep toward licensure,” which would require municipalities to adhere to the same staffing ratios and other requirements as licensed camps, which many municipalities say would make their programs too expensive to run. Linehan says she has pledged to find middle ground on some of the more costly issues like staffing ratios, or hiring medical personnel, as required at licensed programs. “We don’t even have the data to know exactly what the problems are. We just wanted that transparency.”

The creation of a Youth Safety Advisory Council was mandated by the legislature this past session to discuss some of these issues. Linehan said she is hopeful that the case in Bethany will create some momentum around the issue in the 2025 legislative session.

Valerie Stolfi Collins, executive director of the Connecticut Parks and Rec Association, which counts 134 of the state’s 169 municipalities as members, says regulation and oversight are needed for private camps because they fall outside of the protective umbrella of local government.

“Municipalities have town managers, risk managers, town attorneys,” Stolfi Collins said. “Parks and Rec programs also answer to their first selectman and constituents.” Therefore, anyone with a complaint can report it to their municipality. “We believe that our camps with those levels of oversight are very well run and well managed.”

Not everyone agrees. Rep. Patrick Boyd, D-Pomfret, says that, while many municipalities are already running programs for children according to a comparable set of rules, inevitably some are falling through the cracks.

“Who is holding them accountable?” Boyd asked. “Their argument would be, ‘That’s what the town council does.’ But in really small towns, there may just be a couple of people in town government trying to offer something in their community — which is a noble goal. But it needs to be safe.”

Stolfi Collins said the group encourages, but cannot mandate, professional development for its members and has facilitated the training of counselors as mandated reporters. But the association is not a regulatory agency and membership is optional. Bethany, for example, has never been a member, according to Stolfi Collins.

Yet not all municipal governments oppose more regulation. Mike Walsh, the town manager of Granby, says that he would support reasonable changes that would create more safeguards for children.

“I am not comfortable with anybody who says ‘That won’t happen here,’” Walsh said, adding that many professions in the state are subject to licensing requirements, like nurses and contractors. “If we protect our residents from contractors that may not be doing a good job, then we sure as hell should be protecting your children from bad actors.”

The controversy in Bethany shines light on some of the pitfalls of a municipality taking responsibility for running a program for children, Boyd said. For example, the municipality may or may not verify that counselors running these programs have received proper training.

Former counselor Nick Bottone, who worked in Bethany programs for over a decade, said that he was never trained as a mandated reporter, which would have required him to report child abuse and neglect concerns to DCF. A statute that went into effect in 2022 requires staff age 21 and over at youth camps to be trained as mandated reporters. Bottone was already over 21 when that law went into effect, but he said he never got the training.

After the allegations against Mastrangelo came to light, Parks and Rec Director Janice Howard resigned, assistant director Anthony Cofrancesco was put on administrative leave, and Bottone took over as interim director. He said that one of his first actions was to train all of the staff as mandated reporters, even those as young as 18, going above and beyond what the statute requires, since so few staff members were over 21.

Leadership at both the Parks and Recreation Association and the Office of Early Childhood say they would support changing the mandated reporter statute to include younger staff members. The training itself is free and done online.

Background Checks

Notably, the background check requirement is considered a significant burden by the Parks and Rec Association because they would be conducted by the state at a higher cost than many programs currently pay (around $88 per background check, according to the Office of Early Childhood).

Bye says that mandating these checks offers at least two benefits. The check itself ensures that applicants don’t have a history of sexual abuse. The assurance that a check will be done serves as a deterrent to potential predators, who know they need not apply.

But the reverse is also true.

“If they know there is a group of folks that don’t background check, that’s where they’ll go looking for work.”

“I think there’s fear of change,” Bye said, adding that cost-effective child care is also top of mind for the agency. “If you don’t have affordable child care options, you force people into more unregulated situations. I’d say our requirements are not onerous, and it’s basic health and safety we’re looking to protect.”

Bye suggested there may be a middle road to creating more oversight without adding excessive costs, particularly when it comes to rules around background checks and mandated reporter training. The Office of Early Childhood could also be empowered to receive and investigate complaints about municipal programs.

“I think it’s a conversation worth having,” Bye said.

Laura Tillman is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror. She is CT Mirror’s Human Services reporter.

Those chanterelles, prized by chefs the world over for their nutty, peppery flavor, are one of many ingredients Pépin has found in the landscape around the Madison home he’s lived in for four decades. The world-renowned chef has fished the rivers and dug for clams on the beaches. He drinks wine from a local vineyard and makes his impeccable omelets with eggs he buys from a neighbor down the road, flecked with herbs from his garden. On occasion, he’ll pick up a freshly slaughtered chicken or duck from her, too.

This all paints an aspirational picture of seasonal eating in the coastal Connecticut landscape. But to Pépin, ingredients themselves aren’t precious. Eating doesn’t have to be picture-perfect. You’re just as likely to see him shopping at the Big Y, picking up a lonely box of bruised white mushrooms and a pre-cut chicken breast.

“When I came to America in 1959, 1960, there was one salad in the supermarket, that was iceberg — that’s it,” Pépin recalled from his kitchen in Madison. “There was no leek, no shallot, there was basically no fish.”

Pépin is 88 now, and he’s spent more than half of his life in the U.S.

He grew up in war-torn France, at a time when his mother, also a professional cook, concocted desserts with crushed eggshells.

“That’s why I’m a very miserly cook, you know. Taking from my mother, who could cook a dish with basically nothing.”

Pépin left school and home at age 13 to become an apprentice in a kitchen that followed the strict brigade system created by Auguste Escoffier. It’s a French hierarchical model of culinary professionalism that was exported to restaurants across the globe.

Pépin worked his way from station to station, mastering everything from butchery to sauces. For many years he was unable to afford to eat in the restaurants where he labored.

From there, his life reads a bit like a French Forrest Gump: he cooked for three French presidents. A chance decision to check out America brought Pépin to what would unexpectedly become his adopted home. He was offered a job in the Kennedy White House but instead decided to work for the Howard Johnson’s hotel empire, where he was charged with making recipes at a mass scale. It was, for Pépin, an intriguing new challenge, and he’s quick to remind those surprised by his choice that back then a White House cook was an unknown figure behind the kitchen door, rather than a powerful celebrity.

Almost as soon as he arrived in the U.S., Pépin enrolled in Columbia University to learn English. Over more than a decade of study, he completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree there, despite having never finished high school in France.

During that time, he started renting a house with some friends in the Catskills and learned to ski, and he quickly got good enough to become a weekend ski instructor. On the slopes, he met his wife Gloria. He partied with Craig Claiborne and James Beard. He became friends with Julia Child and a cooking host on U.S. television.

This is how most Americans came to know Pépin, on the airwaves with Child. They were an entertaining duo who had the rapport and occasional disagreements indicative of a real friendship. Even before they met, Pépin admired Child’s book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” for the careful and intuitive way it codified technique into a volume that most anyone could follow.

Actually, Pépin was jealous and wished he’d written such a book. Since then, he’s authored more than 30, many of them self-illustrated, covering everything from “The Art of Chicken” to “Happy Cooking.” His 1976 “La Technique” was a landmark volume, with no recipes, just the skills that are taught in a professional kitchen or school. “La Technique” offered the opportunity for a home cook, long before The Food Network or YouTube existed, to close the knowledge gap.

Over the years, Pépin’s books have gotten distinctly less French, drawing on America’s rich foodways and its many immigrant cuisines. “Cooking My Way” includes recipes like black bean soup, a grits soufflé and arroz con pollo.

“I’m probably the quintessential American chef now, rather than French chef,” Pépin said.

Small decisions

Most anyone can relate to Pépin’s theory of how one’s life comes to take shape: “You do some small decisions, which you think are small. Like I say, ‘I’m going to go to America for a year.’” That small decision led him to jobs, friendships, his spouse, TV fame, dozens of books. “I came here, and it’s 60 years later.”

Pépin came to Connecticut after he survived a brutal car accident in 1974. He and his wife had an apartment in New York City, and decided to sell their second home in the Catskills, where their weekends had centered around skiing, a sport Pépin could no longer enjoy. They took a look at some towns within striking distance of New York City. Madison was on the itinerary — they had a few acquaintances there, and it was on the coast.

They found a lot to like. At the time, Madison was a short commute to the train in New Haven, and the property they found was four acres, suitable for a garden and a boules court (a French game similar to bocci, which Pépin adores). Et voila! They decided to call Madison home. It’s a decision Pépin calls “purely arbitrary,” and yet, that’s how a life is made.

That chance decision has had a big impact on Connecticut’s food community.

“He means so much to the culinary world worldwide, but for the state of Connecticut, I don’t think it can fully be measured how many chefs have a story about Jacques,” said Scott Dolch, president of the Connecticut Restaurant Association — whether it’s the story of a teen starstruck by seeing Pépin at an event in Connecticut who went on to become a professional chef, or a chef who had the chance to cook alongside Pépin at a local event, or an aspiring chef who received free training in Hartford thanks to fundraising efforts by Pépin.

In 2022, the Connecticut Restaurant Association honored Pépin with its lifetime achievement award, a suggestion Dolch said was brought to him by chef and restaurateur Dan Meiser.

“To this day, if Jacques is in the room, pick your star-powered chef — those guys are the ones who are like, ‘Holy s—, there’s Jacques Pépin,’” said Meiser of Oyster Club in Mystic. “You look at his impact on the food world in the U.S. in particular, and you can make an argument without question that of all the chefs with us today, he has had the greatest impact on shaping the conversation.”

That conversation centers on sustainability, seasonality, frugality and technique. And it’s a conversation that draws in not just professional chefs but a growing number of home cooks, game to learn how to stuff sausage or bake their own sourdough bread.

Meiser first met Pépin as a cooking student at the now-defunct French Culinary Institute in New York. There, Pépin taught alongside French chefs André Soltner and Alain Sailhac. “It was like going to basketball camp and having Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as your coaches.”

Pépin became an ardent supporter of Meiser when he opened Oyster Club, where chef Rene Touponce was a 2023 James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef Northeast (and in 2024, a James Beard Award finalist for Outstanding Chef at Port of Call, its sister restaurant). Meiser grew up with the same experience of foraging and hunting as Pépin, albeit in Pennsylvania and Connecticut rather than France. Like many who get to know Pépin, the two were soon enjoying many great meals together, often with hunted or foraged ingredients.

And they played boules.

“He’s so competitive, and his game is so good, it’s humbling. I’ve been an athlete my whole life, and he absolutely rules the roost on the boules court.”

Meiser’s story isn’t singular. Across the state, Connecticut chefs who have crossed paths with Pépin find themselves, for decades after, basking in the warmth of his company — and losing to him at boules.

“He’s so kind, so gentle, so thoughtful,” Meiser said. “I have never been around someone else of his elevated status who doesn’t have one single drop of arrogance.”

Chef Michel Nischan, the co-founder of Wholesome Wave, which helps low-income Americans buy nutritious food, first met Pépin when he was working for a hotel, in his case a Marriott. Nischan moved to Connecticut with his young family, looking for a place he could commute into New York for work. Nischan says this trend, of chefs coming to Connecticut for access to one of the great food cities in the world, has helped create the perfect conditions for a restaurant scene that’s starting to gain national recognition in its own right.

Nischan came to Connecticut because it seemed like a good place to raise a family but said, “With Jacques leading the way, there’s a culinary community here as well.”

The great equalizer

A quick tour of Pépin’s kitchen reveals a tin of his signature brand of payusnaya caviar, a kind of pressed caviar paste, in the freezer. There’s also a jar of Jif in the cupboard. As for the eggs Pepin gets from down the road, Meiser sees them through Pépin’s eyes.

“He can make a custard, an omelet, a baked egg dish,” Meiser said. “He looks forward to a simple tomato sandwich at the end of August. In late April, I’ll bet he’s having dreams of asparagus popping up in May.”

Pépin isn’t just drawn to meeting chefs at the state’s top restaurants, Meiser said. “He appreciates people, whether it’s a fry cook at McDonald’s or a saucier. He respects people who have dedicated their lives to food.”

Eight years ago, Pépin and his son-in-law launched the Jacques Pépin Foundation, with the goal of helping a wider swath of people find careers in food.

“I thought, maybe people who have been a bit disenfranchised with life, like people who come out of jail, homeless people, former drug addicts, people like this,” Pépin recalled.

Pépin knew from experience that cooking could be a great equalizer. His foundation raises funds to put people through training programs. When they finish, they might start out working at the bottom rung of a restaurant, as he did, but “if that person likes this, they stay in that restaurant, and maybe five years later, they are the chef there. That’s how it works, and they redo their life. So it’s been very gratifying.”

Pépin doesn’t turn 90 until December of 2025. But he has big plans for the interim. Ninety ticketed dinners will be held across the country beginning this month, where other esteemed chefs will cook and raise funds for the foundation, an effort called 90 for 90. The first four will be held in New York, with the kickoff at Gramercy Tavern.

Dinners like these have formed some of Pépin’s greatest memories. He keeps books of menus that he illustrates from virtually every dinner he’s put on for more than 50 years, a sort of long-running set of diaries. He’s even published a book of illustrated templates that people can use to keep their own memories of special meals.

Pépin is putting out another book soon, a combination of his artwork and recipes. His daughter helps him make Facebook videos of cooking lessons.

“My daughter Claudine, four years ago, said, ‘Why don’t you do a small show for Facebook, like three minutes, four minutes, five.’ I said, OK. So we did some” — some meaning over 300 videos. “We have almost 2 million people on Facebook. I would never have done that — I don’t even go on Facebook. My daughter takes care of that.”

Since Pépin’s wife died in 2020, the community they built in Connecticut keeps him company. So does his dog, Gaston, an 11-year-old black mini poodle, whom he treats with disarming tenderness.

But without Gloria, life here isn’t the same. For more than five decades, the two would sit down for dinner each night and share a bottle of wine.

“So now I sit down by myself. It’s different.”

Laura Tillman is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.

The complaint follows a lengthy investigation by OCA and Disability Rights CT that publicly revealed alarming conditions for those children in specific Connecticut schools earlier this year.

The investigation, which took place between 2019 and 2022, looked at a private school system known as High Road Schools. These private special education schools serve students whose home districts are unable to provide appropriate services for children with special needs. But the investigation alleged that staff at the schools were often uncertified, that education was of poor quality, that students were restrained and put in seclusion at a high rate, and that most children in the programs were sent there from low-income communities of color.

Officials at OCA and Disability Rights CT earlier this summer also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice alleging disability discrimination by four school districts — Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury and Stratford — that send their special needs students to High Road Schools.

That complaint is trying to hold the public school districts accountable, according to Sarah Eagan, the state’s child advocate.

The new complaint is targeting the state’s role, claiming that in its alleged lack of sufficient oversight and regulation, the Connecticut Department of Education is in violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which together ensure that children with disabilities have access to quality education and opportunities.

Eagan said local districts told her office that because the state education department approves the special education programs they rely on that approval.

“The state says school districts contract and pay these schools, so they have a responsibility to make sure that they’re adequate. Each points the finger, so this legal complaint is one way to resolve it,” Eagan said.

High Road Schools have in the past refuted the claims made in the investigative report put out by the groups earlier this year.

“The final report simply does not accurately reflect the academic and behavioral supports at our schools, which follow state and federal regulations and guidelines. Our programs are based on serving the academic and behavioral needs of our students, making the absence of clinical services referenced throughout the report misleading,” the organization has said in a statement. “We remain committed to collaborating with all stakeholders in the state, including the OCA, DCRT, and CSDE to ensure the highest standards of education and care for our students.”

Fueling the new federal complaint are July 2024 reports by the Department of Education, which reviewed the conditions of High Road Schools in response to the investigation. The reports begin by noting that the authors have looked specifically at some of the key issues raised by the OCA, going “above and beyond the standard review process.”

But the body of those reports fail to go into any detail, positive or negative, about how the schools are doing on some of the OCA’s key concerns, like the excessive use of restraint and seclusion. When Eagan’s office followed up with the department to get more detail and requested the support documents for the reports, such as interviews with staff, none could be produced, she said.

Tom Cosker, an advocate for Disability Rights Connecticut, says that he was surprised that even with the amount of public scrutiny of the High Roads schools in recent months, the Department of Education hadn’t been more scrupulous with its report.

“How do you not do better when you know this stuff is happening and everyone has an idea it might be happening?” Cosker said. “It’s surprising that you wouldn’t take a closer look and do a deeper dive, and if you did, you’d say so, to us and to others.”

The Department of Education released a statement in response to the complaint, which restated concerns about the methodology and legal assertions of the OCA and Disability Rights CT’s original investigation. In response, the Department of Education conducted a “targeted, onsite off-cycle standards review of High Road Schools.”

But in sharp contrast to the OCA’s depiction of these reviews as incomplete and unsupported by evidence, the department statement said the reviews instead “further called into question the reliability and accuracy of DRCT/OCA’s claims regarding, among other things, staffing credentials and hiring practices within the High Road Schools.”

Department officials also said they requested “documentation from the OCA to initiate a formal State Complaint… Despite multiple requests for this necessary information, which would have allowed us to conduct an expansive investigation of the claims contained in DRCT/OCA’s report, OCA chose not to provide it to CSDE.”

Laura Tillman is CT Mirror’s Human Services Reporter.

This pantry, in one of the wealthiest enclaves in the nation, is anything but average.

Not only is the food on the pantry’s shelves top-tier, the community’s fundraising efforts are also innovative. Schools in Greenwich have their own “Neighbor to Neighbor” clubs, which marshal donations to the pantry. An annual fundraiser offers residents an ingeniously frictionless way of giving — food left on local doorsteps is taken to Neighbor to Neighbor by their mail carrier.

Generous community members also sponsor special items each month, like new sets of sheets or winter coats. In July, new Under Armor backpacks were distributed for back-to-school.

Food pantries across the state rely on private fundraising to supplement federal and state support. But not all food pantries in Connecticut have such well-resourced communities of potential donors to tap.

So while inflation unleashed during COVID has continued to pinch household food budgets, pushing huge numbers of people across the state to turn to food pantries to get through the month, pantries in the towns with the most need often find it most difficult to meet that demand.

State funding in Connecticut to support pantries is minute. For the more than 600 pantries around the state, Connecticut allocated $1 million of Nutrition Assistance Funding for fiscal years 2024 and 2025. That’s less than a third of Neighbor to Neighbor’s expenses in a single year.

Like Connecticut’s 169 municipalities, pantries are largely independent islands, excelling or struggling to serve clients based on unequal local realities.

The Greenwich gold standard

With its impressive community support, Greenwich’s Neighbor to Neighbor is able to set a gold standard for what a food pantry might be. Clients can visit weekly, and they push shopping carts around a perpetually well-stocked room. The produce section is packed with bok choy, potatoes, yellow squash, peppers and cucumbers, and refrigerators are full of fresh blueberries donated from a New York farmer each summer, along with eggs, milk, cheese and meat. In Greenwich, they virtually never run out of tuna fish, rice or beans, because when stocks run low, they simply use their budget to buy more.

Like most food pantries, Neighbor to Neighbor offers canned goods, but here, those shelf-stable products are overshadowed by the abundance of fresh food offered. In fact, clients at Neighbor to Neighbor take home 75% fresh food, a ratio that the pantry maintains even when local produce dwindles during the winter.

“Honestly, if you ask people, they don’t want cans,” says Duncan Lawson, the manager of Neighbor to Neighbor. “What we’re trying to do this year — we’re trying to go 100% fresh.”

Food insecurity in CT sees sharp increase. Addressing it would cost $375M+, report finds

Lawson, who formerly worked in finance, epitomizes the other asset abundant on the Gold Coast: business savvy. Like Lawson, many volunteers at Neighbor to Neighbor come from corporate and financial backgrounds, and their connections to brands, as well as their marketing and investment knowledge, make this nonprofit run more like an innovative business than a charity (Neighbor to Neighbor’s June 2023 tax filing showed more than $3 million in annual expenses and more than $9 million in assets, including more than $2 million invested in publicly traded securities).

During COVID, while most food pantry managers were simply trying to figure out how to get food to clients and socially distance, Lawson saw the cold hard facts of a commodities market.

“To me it was just like trading — you buy low, sell high.” To that end, Greenwich’s board empowered Lawson to pre-purchase food, anticipating the inflation that pushed prices upward.

Lawson has also worked to recruit volunteers, many of them from local hedge funds, to work in the pantry. And those volunteers soon become donors.

Some may wonder why wealthy Greenwich needs a pantry at all, but the cost of living in town is brutally high. Many of their clients, new immigrants to the United States, want to stay within the desirable school district for their kids but struggle to make rent on their salaries.

Luis Egusquiza, a 44-year-old father of three, moved to Greenwich from Peru about a year ago. He cooks full time at an Italian restaurant and has been coming to the pantry nearly as long as he’s been in the U.S.

“It’s expensive to live here. Rents keep going up,” he said. But the pantry helps him get the basics for his family.

“What we don’t get here, we buy at the store, but rent uses up most of our income,” he said.

Egusquiza pays $3,300 each month for a three-bedroom apartment with no living room.

“The perception is only rich people live here,” Lawson, the pantry manager, said, “but my argument to that is, ‘well, who cuts your grass and does your child care, and who cleans your house?’ Because they’re not sitting in a $2 million mansion cleaning yours.”

Fairfield County inequality

Meanwhile, less than 30 miles up Interstate 95 in Bridgeport, Nicholas Martinez winced when asked about the empty bins at the food pantry he runs in the Thomas Merton Family Center. As the pantry neared its closing time, shelf-stable goods remained, but in the produce section, there were just a few bins left: onions, turnips and deep yellow bananas.

“I don’t really have much upstairs right now. My next shipment gets in on Friday,” Martinez said.

That afternoon, he took a few hundred dollars from a recent donation drive and bought the cheapest produce he could find — apples, onions, potatoes. “Things I can get a lot of.”

In Bridgeport, 22.5% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the most recent census data, and the Thomas Merton pantry is only able to provide one visit per month to its clients — compared to weekly visits at Greenwich’s Neighbor to Neighbor. It’s frustrating for Martinez to carefully ration food for a community so in need.

“If I had enough food, I’d say they could come here three, four times a week,” Martinez said. “The problem is, guess what? The next person behind me is gonna have nothing to take.”

Demand for services at Thomas Merton has tripled in the last six months alone — a rise Martinez attributes both to the pantry’s change to a more visible location and the rising cost of housing and food prices that’s pushing more people to pantries across the U.S.

Liz Martin, a volunteer, has been coming to Thomas Merton for five years from her home in the nearby town of Fairfield. She was inspired after reading a book by the center’s namesake, a Trappist monk, who once wrote, “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone — we find it with another.”

Despite its location within one of the wealthiest counties in the country, Thomas Merton struggles to attract volunteers like Martin — and the donations that allow Neighbor to Neighbor to consistently fill its shelves with fresh food.

Martin was drawn to Bridgeport out of a desire to “understand what I read about and hear on the news and not be estranged from it. When you’re not in any way connected to the needs of your fellow humans in your country, you can be more judgmental about it.”

But she admits that, despite telling family and friends about her experiences there, she has not succeeded in drawing them to Bridgeport to join her.

Dramatic rise in need

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic set off a huge rise in demand for food assistance, with job losses, rising prices and kids staying at home all contributing to demand.

It’s a rare household that’s immune to the rising cost of milk — from around $3 to $4 between 2019 and 2022, or eggs, from $1.40 to $2.85 in those three years. According to data collected by the United Way of Connecticut, 2-1-1 inquiries about food went from around 48,000 in 2019 to 228,000 in 2020. After a brief dip, pantries say that need has intensified anew, and that’s reflected in the numbers. There were around 160,000 requests in 2022 and 198,000 in 2023.

Salaam Bhatti, the SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit that researches food security, says that rising housing costs, especially acute in Connecticut, are inextricably linked to pressure on pantries.

“It’s the ‘rent eats first,’ phenomenon,” Bhatti said. “Most of a family’s budget goes toward rent, utilities. Then the grocery budget takes a hit. Parents will skip meals so their children can eat. We see kids who are eating their last meal of the week at school on Friday, going hungry and not eating until they’re in school again on Monday.”

The pandemic helped reduce some of the stigma around receiving supplemental food — and that’s a positive change that might ensure that the child Bhatti referenced eats over the weekend.

Karen Thomas says she’s seen this changing attitude play out in Torrington as director of the Friendly Hands Food Bank. There, clients were able to pull up in their cars during the pandemic, making the experience more private, and the group also put on food giveaways where they didn’t ask the usual screening questions about income levels. That helped bring out some folks who hadn’t visited a pantry before.

The numbers in Torrington are shocking. Friendly Hands served 300 households each month before the pandemic. Now it serves 6,000. Of those, two client groups are growing: unhoused people, and those with full time jobs. Some former donors have even become clients.

“In some cases, it’s a husband and a wife, and they both have jobs, and they have kids, and they can’t keep up with the bills,” Thomas said. “How do you look at your child’s face when they say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and you tell them, ‘We don’t have enough food’ or ‘You can’t eat that, we’re saving that’?”

And that’s where the resources surrounding a pantry come into play. While most pantries surveyed said the quantity of food they can provide per client has gone down as demand has gone up, Neighbor to Neighbor has managed to serve nearly twice as many clients as it did pre-COVID without cutting back.

Islands of aid

Food pantries differ dramatically, and those differences don’t just reflect local economic realities. Depending on whether a pantry is run by a large institution or a church, a few volunteers or a professional group, there can be tremendous variations.

And you don’t have to go far to see the differences between pantries. Even in the same ZIP code, or in the case of Hartford, the same city block, pantries serve the public in dramatically different ways.

To some extent, that’s just a function of the role they play within the organizations that run them. Loaves and Fishes Community Kitchen has a food focus, whereas the Institute for Hispanic Families offers a pantry in addition to its programs for seniors and preschoolers. Some pantries pop up once every couple of weeks and are run solely by volunteers. Recently, clients lined up for hours in the July sun to receive pre-packed bags of groceries at one small Hartford pantry, while still others operate through well-resourced hospital systems, where both clients and staff have access.

Going to one pantry doesn’t prohibit a client from visiting another, so some families may visit a pantry with more fresh produce and another where they receive more shelf-stable goods to get through the month.

Connecticut Foodshare

Connecticut Foodshare, which serves around 600 pantries across the state, tries to level the playing field by consolidating food donations and creating partnerships with supermarkets to stretch dollars further.

Because the massive nonprofit can buy food at cost and store a tremendous amount in its warehouses, Connecticut Foodshare can take advantage of opportunities that might pass a smaller food bank by. A fortuitous offer from a company to offload a truck packed with juice or milk, for example, can only be housed in a massive facility until it can be distributed across pantries. The group also has a mobile distribution program, through which it creates pop-up pantries in 113 locations across the state.

Some of the food distributed by Connecticut Foodshare comes from The Emergency Food Assistance Program, TEFAP. Some food comes to Foodshare from large grocery chains like Stop & Shop and Big Y, and some food retailer donations are facilitated by the national nonprofit, Feeding America. Still more food is purchased by the food bank from wholesalers at a deep discount, so it can resell that food to individual pantries with no markup.

Connecticut Foodshare requires its partner pantries to give the TEFAP food they distribute to any Connecticut resident who meets certain income criteria. Some pantries — like Neighbor to Neighbor — promote themselves as a service for locals. And it’s true that the Under Armor Backpacks and farm-fresh blueberries that the pantry privately works to secure for clients are not part of that TEFAP contribution. So while any Nutmegger should be able to come to Neighbor and get those items, the pantry can restrict the rest of what they offer to Greenwich residents.

Baking a bigger pie

While Connecticut Foodshare makes more free and cheap food accessible statewide, it can only distribute what it gets. Most of what the food bank gives to pantries must be donated. That’s either excess food from sources like grocery stores and wholesalers or donations of money the group can then spend on food.

The overall pie of food that Connecticut Foodshare divvies up is large, but it gets split into many pieces, said president and CEO Jason Jakubowski.

“If we have two pantries, two pantries are getting two halves of the pie. If we have 600 pantries, they’re getting much smaller slices of the pie,” Jakubowski said.

During the pandemic, Connecticut Foodshare was able to meet growing demand thanks to federals programs like the American Rescue Plan Act and the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which purchased food from farmers who lost their usual customers, and redistributed that food to people in need. Connecticut Foodshare served as a middleman in the state for that food. But while those resources have dried up, demand for food has not.

“The biggest frustration we have had over the last several years is that the need is about as big as it was at the peak of the pandemic, but the lesser amount of government food has created a donut hole in the system that we simply can’t replace with donated food,” Jakubowski said. “That right there is exactly what keeps me up at night.”

That’s a big hole to fill: Connecticut Foodshare says it received more than 27 million pounds of federal food at the height of the pandemic in 2021, whereas it got 8 million pounds in 2023.

Jakubowski said it’s possible to fill that hole — or at least try to get close — with more state funding. Around $850,000 was contributed from state funds for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 to Connecticut Foodshare, from a line item of $1 million for nutrition assistance in the Department of Social Services’ budget. Compare that to neighboring states like New Jersey and Massachusetts, which have contributed $85 and $41.5 million respectively to their food banks in recent years.

Jakubowski unsuccessfully advocated for $10 million in state assistance during the 2024 legislative session and says he’ll try again in 2025.

Chris Collibee, Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget spokesman, acknowledged the need.

“Gov. Lamont is extremely thankful for the part that Connecticut’s food banks play in filling gaps for families experiencing food insecurity and recognizes the impact of the rising cost of food,” he said. “The administration is meeting with Connecticut Foodshare in the very near future and, as always, is open to hearing their concerns.”

But those advocating for the issue are frustrated that Connecticut continues to contribute a shadow of what neighbors in the region offer to pantries, especially given the state’s surplus of more than $4 billion.

“When you look at the surplus numbers, it becomes harder and harder to explain why we can’t do something as basic as feed our citizens,” said State Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, a co-sponsor of a 2024 bipartisan bill that proposed $10 million go to food banks.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Foodshare is working to recruit more food donations from businesses. And while the public can donate cans or boxes of food, dollars do more to serve the food insecure. With the prices it gets, Connecticut Foodshare can turn $1 into two meals.

Handing it back

One day last spring, Thomas Merton pantry director Martinez opened the doors to a long line of clients in Bridgeport. Demand was escalating by the week, and the pantry was serving 50 households every day. Seeing the empty bins, one of the pantry’s regular clients handed him $60. His first instinct was to hand it back.

“She said, ‘don’t worry — it’s not for you, it’s for the pantry.’” The woman told Martinez that she believes that everyone should take when they’re in need — but give when they have something to offer. Martinez took the donation and took a break from his shift.

“I locked myself in the bathroom and I just started crying. I felt very grateful.”

It wasn’t, Martinez said, a loaves-and-fishes moment. That $60 could only buy so much. But at a time when Martinez felt like he was drowning, that the pantry couldn’t possibly keep up with the rising tide of demand, that handful of cash gave him something else.

“It’s one of the purest feelings of hope I’ve ever experienced.”

This is the first in a occasional series about food insecurity. Next, some of the creative solutions to fundraising, growing food and more from pantries across the state.

Laura Tillman is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.