[Vision2020] Legislative Report

[Shirley Ringo]

Dear Friends:

 

Greetings from the legislature.  It appears that we are approaching the final days of this session.

 

Last Friday, the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee set the proposed budget for K-12 education.   With my colleague from the minority party, Wendy Jaquet, I prepared a proposal.  Our proposal used just under $1.329 billion of general funds, $42 million of stimulus funds (leaving about $40 million stimulus funds for future education use), $6 million of public school "rainy day" funds, and a one-year reduction of support for textbooks.  With those resources, we eliminated several proposals to which State Superintendent Tom Luna refers as his "necessary bad ideas."  Our proposal restored support to school transportation, maintained the early retirement program for teachers, restored experience increments on the salary grid, eliminated a prescribed three day "furlough," and restored administrator staff allowances.   We were saddened that our proposal required a reduction in base pay of 3%.  It is amazing to me to see how hard our state superintendent fights to keep his "bad ideas."

 

It appears that legislation will be passed that requires the reduction in support for school transportation, phases out the early retirement program over two years, and eliminates the experience increment in the teacher salary schedule.  It should be noted that this "grid freeze" applies to state reimbursement to districts for teacher pay.  On the local level, districts don't have to follow suit if they can find the resources to do otherwise.

 

Our proposal was defeated along a party-line vote.  The successful motion reduced the general fund appropriation to $1.309 million, and used $60.6 million of stimulus funds (leaving $20 million of stimulus funds for future education use).  This proposal cuts administrator pay by 5%; cuts the teacher base salary by 2.63% and eliminates experience increments for a total reduction of about 3.5%; and reduces pay for support personnel by 2.63%.  It phases out the early retirement program over a two year period, reduces support for school transportation and reduces the administrator staff allowance.  It is similar to our proposal in that the call for three-day "furloughs" is eliminated.  The general fund expenditure in this budget is down 7.7% from last year.  Disregarding the increase in the 2010 budget required for projected student growth, the reduction in effort from the general fund is down  over 9% from the 2009 fiscal year budget.

 

Overall, the education budget shows an increase of 0.4% over the 2009 fiscal year budget.  This may be attributed to an infusion of federal stimulus money for IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), in addition to the $60.0 general stimulus dollars used to support education in this budget.



Shirley Ringo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20090401/e372d079/attachment.html