School funding recommendation: No recommendation
Senate Education Chairman John Goedde, R-Coeur d'Alene, made his presentation to JFAC this morning on how to deal with the public school budget, and in the end, there essentially was no recommendation. "We couldn't get consensus," Goedde said. He told JFAC, "We had no consensus in our committee although we debated that for a number of hours."
House Education Chairman Bob Nonini didn't speak this morning. "Rep. Nonini was offered an opportunity to come to us," said Senate Finance Chairman Dean Cameron, R-Rupert. "He basically had the same message that Sen. Goedde has. ... They had met, spent a lot of hours with our staff, and really couldn't come to a consensus or a conclusion as to a recommendation for us." He told Goedde, "We're grateful for the time you spent on it, and we'll look forward to working with you to come up with a solution."
Goedde plans to introduce an education reform bill this morning in the Senate State Affairs Committee that is the new version of the former SB 1113, which had sought to increase class sizes and cut 770 teaching jobs in the next two years to generate savings to funnel into a laptop computer for every high school student, performance pay for teachers and more. Now, the bill doesn't contain any of those pieces, nor does it require online classes. Instead, Goedde said, it re-establishes line items in the public school budget for technology, for technology-related professional development, and for math and technology to meet increasing graduation requirements, and moves to bring the minimum teacher salary back up to $30,000 and begin restoring the teacher salary grid. All would be done while cutting the budget, he acknowledged.
"If this passes, the will have made some determinations for priorities of the funds we're providing to the districts," Goedde said. That'd be a departure from last year's approach for dealing with public school budget cuts, in which legislators moved essentially all required line items into the "discretionary" category, to give school districts maximum flexibility to deal with the cuts.
