It Could Be Worse....

....we could be California:

Since the fall, when lawmakers began trying to attack the gaps in the $143 billion budget that their earlier plan had not addressed, the state has fallen into deeper financial straits, with more bad news coming daily from Sacramento. The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.

Twenty-thousand layoff notices will go out on Tuesday morning, Matt David, the communications director for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Monday night. “In the absence of a budget we need to realize this savings and the process takes six months,” Mr. David said.

God, Vishnu, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster willing, we won't go down that road here in Washington.

Hot Dog!

According to Schmudget the recently-signed stimulus package could be used to backfill in the cuts that Governor Gregoire proposed to levy equalization and class size reduction funding. If that's even close to being the case it's a big, big sigh of relief for school districts around the state.

More from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities here.

The next big thing to watch will be the early budget forecast this coming Thursday, February 19th, where it's fully expected that the $5 billion dollar deficit Governor Gregoire prepared for is now an $8 billion dollar hole in the treasury. That'll be a big, big indicator about where things might go for the rest of the session.

You Know What's Fun? Reading the State Budget!

Happy the Budget Deer Loves Substitute House Bill 1128!

No, really! You can download the last one here; zip ahead to section 5 and you'll get to the stuff that matters most to us, regarding education funding. It's 57 pages of numbers, and I think that given the state of the budget that's where the opportunity lies. For example, take this from page 149:

Within the amounts provided in this subsection, the superintendent shall recognize the extraordinary accomplishments of four students who have demonstrated a strong understanding of the civics essential learning requirements to receive the Daniel J. Evans civic education award. The students selected for the award must demonstrate understanding through completion of at least one of the classroom-based civics assessment models developed by the superintendent of public instruction, and through leadership in the civic life of their communities. The superintendent shall select two students from eastern Washington and two students from western Washington to receive the award, and shall notify the governor and legislature of the names of the recipients.

Sounds like a nice enough program, surely, but given that we've got a $6 billion dollar hole to fill the question that we should be asking about every single thing we do is pretty simple:

Is it worth it?

I'm not sure where I first heard the phrase "Christmas tree items" to descrive those pieces that are added into a budget that pay for certain pet programs; they're hung on to the main body, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Our education budget last time had a wide variety of those items, and they all should be run through the same filter: were they worth it?

• $1,895,000 to operate the State Board of Education
  
• $2,000,000 for operating costs for the Professional Educator Standards Board
  
• $7,558,000 to fund alternative routes to teacher certification
  
• $555,000 for litigation fees surrounding various lawsuits
  
• $600,000 to replace of the apportionment system
  
• $156,000 "to provide direct services and support to schools around an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to instruction in conservation, natural resources, sustainability, and human adaptation to the environment."
  
• $2,563,000 "for the creation of a statewide data base of longitudinal student information."
  
• $650,000 "for comprehensive cultural competence and anti-bias education programs for educators and students."
  
• $100,000 "to promote the financial literacy of students." As an aside, they're about to get a hell of a lesson on what overspending can do!
  
• $270,000 to implement a bill "regarding educational data and data systems."
  
• $228,000 for the "legislative youth advisory council."
  
• $193,000 for "children and families of incarcerated parents."
  
• $55,000 for the "Washington college bound scholarship."
  
• $49,000 "regarding providing medically and scientifically accurate sexual health education in schools."
  
• $45,000 for food allergy guidelines.
  
• $84,000 "to support a program to recognize the work of outstanding classified staff in school districts throughout the state." That's enough to pay for 2 or 3 classified employees.
  
• $194,000 "to support a full-time director of skills centers within the office of the superintendent of public instruction."
  
• $1,030,000 to pay for two studies from the NWREL about ELL and the "k-3 demonstration projects."
  
• $200,000 for a study from WSU on school bullying.
  
• $5,082,000 for a "school nursing corp" based out of the ESDs.
  
• $192,000 for the School Safety Center at OSPI.

....and that's just the first 8 pages. It adds up to $23,699,000. Not all of it is discretionary--I'm pretty sure that the state Constitution mandates we have a State Board of Education--but is there potential for them (and the PESB) to do things as leanly as possible for a couple of years? The big things out of the State Board lately have been the new accountability matrix and Core 24; let's not do those, and not spend any more money on them, and see what happens.

The Solution to the Education Budget Crisis!

Governor Gregoire and Superintendent Dorn can thank this guy:

Tom Farber gives a lot of tests. He's a calculus teacher, after all.
So when administrators at Rancho Bernardo, his suburban San Diego high school, announced the district was cutting spending on supplies by nearly a third, Farber had a problem. At 3 cents a page, his tests would cost more than $500 a year. His copying budget: $316. But he wanted to give students enough practice for the big tests they'll face in the spring, such as the Advanced Placement exam.

"Tough times call for tough actions," he says. So he started selling ads on his test papers: $10 for a quiz, $20 for a chapter test, $30 for a semester final.

San Diego magazine and The San Diego Union-Tribune featured his plan just before Thanksgiving, and Farber came home from a few days out of town to 75 e-mail requests for ads. So far, he has collected $350. His semester final is sold out.

As a first grade teacher I can easily see how this could be brought down to my grade level:

"What letter is this, Johnny?"
"P!"
"And what does P stand for...?"
"P'Zone, available only from Pizza Hut!"
"Good boy! Here's a coupon."

The branding opportunities abound. Yay!

Damn You, Mulick!

This would be an absolute disaster for school district budget planning:

“We’ll probably be going into a lot of overtime,” Haler said. “I’ve been talking with legislators on both sides of the aisle. We don’t expect to get out until the end of June.”

End of June?(!)

Could it be that budget talks have broken down before they’ve even started?

Big problems call for a thorough discussion, but by the Gods that woud be a six month legislative session. By the middle of May I would expect the caucuses to be taking up arms and fighting each other in a running, bloody battle down Capitol Way.

Thanks for giving me one more thing to worry about, Chris Mulick of the Tri-Cities Herald.

Statplay

The US Census Bureau just released their nationwide look at education spending, which is pretty interesting reading for anyone who deal with money issues in education. Some Washington State information from the report:

• We are 38th in per-pupil K-12 spending.
  
• We trail the national average in per-pupil spending by about $1300 a kid ($9,138 to $7,830).
  
• In terms of overall K-12 spending Washington is 37th in the nation. The report takes a neat look behind the numbers (p. 23) and shows just how reliant we are on the state for our funding; in terms of federal and local dollars received Washington State ranks 39th and 40th, respectively, but we're number 16 in the amount that the state puts into the K-12 system.
  
• That above number almost suggests that the state is doing a fairly good job on their end of funding the system, which is counterintuitive to what we've been hearing. This is why the per-pupil number matters more than the overall figure does.

I'll be curious to see how state newspapers process this information; if it's anything like the one article I read out of Oklahoma, it could be fun.

The Seattle Times on Career and Technical Education

The recent state budget commits nearly $100 million to expand and refresh CTE programs around the state, which I think is the way things should be--people in the trades can earn just as much money as those who have gone the college --> professional route, and I don't think that we honor those career choices nearly enough.

The Seattle Times has a good overview of what the new CTE programs look like and how they could change with this new influx of cash. It's a good investment by the state.

The League of Education Voters Compares the Budgets

They've put together a handy website here that shows the differences between the House and Senate budget proposals. With Sine Die coming up soon, it'll be interesting to see what makes it through the process and what doesn't.

A tip of the hat to The Comp Book for pointing the way.

Highlights of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education 2008 Supplemental Operating Budget

That’s a mouthful, innit?

I had written a two-page overview of the House budget, with links, but the problem is that I find budgets to be maddeningly boring, which is why I don't live by one (sorry, Visa!). Thankfully, the good folks at the Washington Association of School Administrators have been on the case with readable budget analysis. Good on them!

(Their This Week in Olympia newsletter is aces. Great reading for anyone with an interest in politics or schools!)

It's a big week in the legislature. Bills that don't get out of the House Appropriations or Senate Ways and Means Committees by tomorrow are pretty much done; the big one for the WEA will be to see if HB2458 on class size has any legs to it. There were a couple of really good Republican bills that didn't get a hearing that I'll be talking about later this week, while restoring the COLA sounds like it actually might have some life to it. Time permitting, I'll post what I can here!