A read through the new school-reform bill introduced today, SB 1184, yields some surprises: It still seeks to provide a laptop computer to every Idaho high school student. It just pushes the plan back a year, providing laptops and training to teachers in 2012-13, then to a third of high school students the following year, continuing until there's one laptop for every student. It still envisions requirements for online courses; the state Board of Education would be charged with setting rules requiring online courses as a graduation requirement starting with the Class of 2016 - that's students who start 9th grade in the fall of 2012. And the bill still permits parents to enroll students in online classes with or without the permission of their local school districts, and requires the school districts to pay the online course providers through a "fractional ADA" formula that directs part of the district's state funding to the online provider.

You can read the bill here. Its fiscal note says it would cost the state $5.5 million next year, which would be covered by $9.4 million in savings from the already passed SB 1108, then save the state $21.7 million the next year and $35 million in each subsequent year. But a breakout from the state Department of Education shows that all those "savings" would go to fund the teacher pay-for-performance plan enacted in the already passed SB 1110; there would be no net savings. Instead, the bill shifts money from existing salary-based apportionment, the funding stream from the state to school districts that largely goes to salaries, to cover the new technology requirements and the performance pay.

"Districts are going to decide how they're going to deal with those cuts at the local level," said Melissa McGrath, spokeswoman for state schools Supt. Tom Luna. "It's instead of increasing the divisor under the old bill. They said they would rather just be cut and deal with it at the local level. It's basically reducing the amount of state money that's going to school districts and letting them decide how they're going to deal with that, rather than increasing the divisor."

The divisor is the formula that determines state funding per classroom; the previous version of the bill, SB 1113, would have raised the divisor, increasing class sizes and cutting 770 teaching jobs over the next two years, to get the money to funnel into technology upgrades and merit-pay bonuses.