House Dems on Same Page with Strickland Ed Plan?
Monday, April 20th, 2009 By Beth Lear
Governor Strickland is singing a cooperative tune about the Education Funding Plan the House Democrats have presented. But has he read it?
House Democrats are also claiming their plan simply improves the Governor’s. But they’ve certainly changed or eliminated many of Strickland’s key components. House Democrats have:
- Increased the teacher salaries plus additional 14% for benefits.
- Changed Strickland’s requirements for rural schools.
- Phased-in the funding changes over a ten year period.
- Eliminated minimum student-teacher ratio mandates and replaced them with “suggested” classroom sizes.
- Eliminated the additional 20 school days and instead require “calamity days to be made up” to add days to the schedule.
- Provided an ”opt-out” of the full day Kindergarten mandate for schools that are at capacity.
- Added funding for gifted programs.
- Used accurate special education funding weights and restored related programs.
- Increased funding to career tech education and joint vocational school education.
- Restored funding for Education Service Centers to 2009 funding levels.
The bottom line is that Governor Strickland campaigned on fixing school finance, and even asked that his tenure be judged by whether or not he succeeded. Now even his own party in the House is backing away from his proposal, slicing and dicing it until not much remains that resembles the Governor’s original plan.
A responsible education budget takes into account the fact that much of the money being used is temporary. Will the House majority understand this, and write a responsible bill? Or will we have to wait for the Senate to fix this mess?
