Lawmakers Slash Education Board Proposals In Victory For Fox, Budget Writers Reject Compliance Officer, Vocational Emphasis

Legislative budget writers joined the political struggle between State Schools Superintendent Anne Fox and the Board of Education on Wednesday, siding with Fox in a move critics claim limits the board’s ability to ensure its policies are being carried out.

In a series of votes, the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee rejected Gov. Phil Batt’s recommendation for a board employee to monitor institution compliance with policies.

The panel followed that up with what Sen. John Hansen, an Idaho Falls Republican who previously chaired the Education Committee, said was a repudiation of the board’s 70 Percent Committee initiative to focus on vocation programs for the vast majority of students who do not go to college.

Although it approved $1.4 million more for vocational education programs than the governor recommended, it refused to adopt a declaration supporting the board’s goals. Coupled with a letter to the board that no money for the colleges and universities can be diverted to the enhanced vocational education effort, Hansen declared the Legislature had turned its back on the training initiative.

“We don’t support the goals of the 70 Percent Committee,” he said. “It’s a simple policy statement.”

The initiative has been a target of officials who fear it will divert cash from individual vocational-education programs at the two junior colleges, Eastern Idaho Technical College, Lewis-Clark State College and Boise State and Idaho State universities.

The commission’s modest budget was rammed through in a matter of minutes with no discussion. The decisions were cloaked with concern about earlier decisions for spending in excess of the target general tax budget of $1.56 billion.

“We’ve got to start finding a way to hold this spending down a little bit,” Republican Sen. Stan Hawkins of Ucon told his colleagues.

Coincidentally, GOP Rep. Ron Black of Twin Falls, who is challenging Fox for the party’s nomination for state superintendent in May, led the fight to deny the Board of Education a compliance officer. He said there was concern that the educational institutions are being micromanaged by the board and more staff would only aggravate that problem.

Black, who otherwise has shown Fox no quarter from a budgeting standpoint, relied on a Feb. 10 legal advisory from the attorney general’s office that he says shows the state superintendent is the executive officer of the board, not its secretary.

Others contend the opinion merely restates that the board sets educational policy, and, in terms of public schools, the superintendent carries it out.

Black told the committee that while Batt recommended the addition of the compliance officer, he had spoken a day earlier with the governor, who endorsed his approach.

“He said he appreciated what I was trying to do, that it was an awful mess that needed to be cleaned up,” Black said.

But Batt said on Wednesday that he never discussed the board budget with Black and that their meeting focused on the disputed attorney general’s letter.

“I said it was proper to clarify the roles between the two, that it is confusing,” Batt said. “I had no opinion on whether it’s right or wrong. Basically, I thanked him for giving me the opinion, and I said I’d look at it.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the issue seemed to agree that the focal point is the power struggle between Fox and the board.

“It seems to be heightened this year,” Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, said. “It seems people are being jerked around, that the universities are being jerked around.”

But Democratic Sen. Marguerite McLaughlin of Orofino, who sided with Batt’s proposal, said that kind of turf war should be debated in another forum.

Later in the day, in the Senate Education Committee, Chairman Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, lambasted Fox and her department for trying to achieve through budget bills what his committee and its House counterpart have rejected.