Legislative session coming to an end

The Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee finished its budget work on Monday, march 28 signaling that we are at the beginning of the end of the session. There will be last minute efforts to get proposed legislation through the process but committees will begin shutting down and legislators will be looking forward to going home.

Two major legislative actions took place during these last days that allowed JFAC to complete its budget work. These were the passage of the third school reform bill, Senate Bill 1184 in the Senate that provided final direction to JFAC in developing the Public School Budget. The House Education Committee passed the bill on March 29 and the House is expected to approve the legislation and forward it to the governor.

In addition to other provisions, SB1184 allows more flexibility in use of funds for public school support in an effort to minimize the impacts of reduced revenues. The legislation reallocates dollars from the school funding formula to other areas within the school budget. Other provisions of the bill include creating a taskforce to “study and develop plans for implementation of online courses, one-to-one mobile computing devices (laptops) and other advanced technology in the classroom.” It also provides one-third of high-school students access to laptop type computers beginning with the 2013-2014 school year until “all students have access to such devices by 2015-2016.”

A large concern of those opposing the bill is the allocation of funds within the public school budget that results in a reduction in salary support for teachers, administrators and other support staff to help fund other funding requirements of the legislation, including providing laptop computers to students and other technology requirements.

However, the public school budget forwarded by JFAC to the Legislature for approval resulted in cuts to Idaho schools that weren’t as bad as we first thought they might be. The total public schools budget for FY2012 is $1.561 billion, a decrease of about $47 million from the current fiscal year (FY 2011) estimated expenditures. These dollar amounts include federal funds, some of which are not available again this year making the budget for public schools even more difficult to develop.

On a brighter note, we had originally expected a cut of about $62 million to the public schools budget, but legislation that authorized a plan to add more state tax collectors to the tax commission is expected to add about $15 million more to our next year’s revenues. This additional revenue was used to help reduce the cuts to public education from the $62 million to the $47 million amount.

In summary the difference in public school funding in FY 2012 from the estimated expenditures for the current FY 2011 is approximately an 0.8 percent (8/10th percent) increase in General Fund support, but an overall decrease of 2.9 percent in overall funding for public schools.

This has been a difficult session, but we will be adjourning (I hope) the week of April 4 with a balanced budget that minimizes as much as possible the reductions to state supported programs.

Thanks for reading!

Rep. George Eskridge represents District 1B in the state House of Representatives.