Budget Proposals Were Heard for First Time Yesterday in Joint Session of House Appropriations and Finance Committee and Senate Finance Committee
Legislators have adjourned for the weekend. Given the crush of business for this session, this may be their only 3-day weekend; although the first few weekends during a 60-day session usually have little legislative business. No action on budget cutting for this year has yet occurred. Call legislators at home this weekend and tell them that education cuts don't heal!
Budget proposals made their first public appearance for this legislative session in a joint meeting of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee and the Senate Finance Committee yesterday afternoon. All versions offer cuts in education spending for the current year and next. This year's cuts are largely by not expending funds not distributed to school districts in the preliminary calculation of unit value in the public school funding formula. Some funds are held back to provide for new units created since the beginning of the year. If these new units are taken into account, there will only be a little over five million dollars left over and not needed support of the funding formula. However, the bills before the legislature propose to take some $23 million out of public school support! These cuts would result in a decrease in unit value and create hardship in school districts faced with midyear cuts. Our message to legislators must be, "Hold public school harmless from cuts in this year's budget!" Senate Bill 79 contains the cuts proposed by the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC), the interim committee that considers finances before the legislative session. Once the session begins the recommendations of interim committees are taken up by the standing committees of the legislature. Follow this link to tell legislators to hold schools harmless from any cuts this year.
In brief, the LFC recommended $2.5 billion for public school support, which is about $40 million more than the governor proposed but about 1.5 percent less than the current budget. Schools are cut under the spending plans by the LFC and the Richardson administration. The governor proposed state aid cuts of $30 million by allowing schools to have larger class sizes, $14 million by reducing one school day and $50 million by having schools pay for property and liability insurance costs with earmarked money for school maintenance. These cuts will increase class size and reduce the instructional time available to children. Most school employees (Teachers and others who work a normal school year) will lose one day of work and one day of pay---a .5% cut in salary!
Follow these links for an outline of the Governor's proposal and the LFC proposal for next year.
Follow this link to ask for adequate funding for next year.
Legislative Alert on Funding Cuts or next year
Both this year's cuts and the funding levels proposed for next year represent unacceptable responses to our state's budget crisis.
As our first task this year, we must forcefully let our representatives know that any cut in public school funding for the current year is one cut too many.
Reduced funding for next year means children cannot get back a year lost to over-crowed classes! As legislative committees begin to craft cuts in the current year budget and propose reduced spending for next year, we need to insist on no cuts to education in the current year and the increased funding we need for next year.
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