Lawmakers Withdraw New Schools Chief Power Fox Would Have Been Given Authority To Withhold Funds

Legislative budget writers on Friday quickly withdrew the sweeping new authority they had given - just one day before - to the state schools superintendent to withhold state aid from school districts.

“It appears to give them a little more power than I want to give the Department of Education,” Republican Sen. Evan Frasure of Pocatello said.

As it wrapped up the week, the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee also punished the university research committee by terminating a $500,000 grant program. The move was in retaliation for an Idaho State University professor suing because he was denied grant money to research the turn-of-the-century development of gay communities in the Northwest.

And the panel agreed to divert cash from the existing public-school technology program to finance half of Gov. Phil Batt’s proposal to link all school and public libraries by computer to thousands of periodicals.

It also voted overwhelmingly to add $1.4 million in general tax support to Batt’s budget for the three universities and Lewis-Clark State College. Included in the extra money is $1.1 million to help ease the impact of rapid student growth at Idaho State.

Without dissent, the budget writers stripped from the 1998-1999 state school aid package the authority they had approved a day earlier to let the superintendent set criteria for school districts to receive their allocation of state support.

What was left after several minutes of editing was a statement that the Education Department could monitor and evaluate the way school districts use any extra money lawmakers earmark for special programs. The department has that power anyway.

State Schools Superintendent Anne Fox said she needed the authority to withhold aid from districts refusing to comply with standards she sets to obtain information. Fox said she needs the information to respond to criticisms lodged in legislative audits on pupil transportation and substance abuse programs.

But the authority had never been sought before, and Republican Sen. Cecil Ingram of Boise said he had been hearing concern that “they might throw out the rules and other things” with the new power.

Fox’s proposal came after lawmakers shelved her plan to subject school districts running a deficit longer than a year or displaying chronically low academic achievement to be accountable to the state department. She would have set the criteria determining low achievement.

The House Education Committee also discarded her proposal to require teacher education to include course work on phonics and schools to devote part of every class day to teaching phonics to pupils still unable to read.

Senate Finance Chairman Atwell Parry led the push to terminate the so-called Special Research Grant Program because Idaho State professor Peter Boag is challenging in court the denial of his project on grounds that it had no commercial application, as lawmakers had directed it must.

Boag claimed the denial was really an objection by the Higher Education Research Council to research involving homosexuals. And he buttressed that claim by citing council approval, under the commercial application mandate, of projects entitled “Marching as to War: Presbyterian Missionaries and the Origins of American Relations with Iran” and “Editing the Clarendon Edition of George Eliot’s ‘Adam Bede.”’

“I think it’s sad,” Parry declared, “when we have a governing board that has rules and regulations for grants and when someone does not get a grant he turns around and sues. … It’s reasonable that we back up and take a year to look at this.”

The council still has control of $1.6 million for other research efforts.

In agreeing to divert cash to the library link with periodicals from the annual $10.4 million appropriation to public schools for computerizing Idaho’s classrooms, advocates said that in the past four years the state and school districts combined have spent nearly $100 million wiring buildings and putting computers into them.

“It seems only appropriate to me that we give these people some of the tools to start using this technology,” Ingram said in backing the diversion of $265,000 for the library computer link. The remaining $200,000 will be included in the State Library budget.