The Senate Bill
Two weeks ago the Senate K-12 Omnibus Bill was completed and adopted by the full Senate. The bill contains all of the major provisions we have been actively promoting relative to charter school accountability and innovation. As you may remember, the bill also contains two very problematic provisions for the future of the charter school movement in Minnesota.
The first is the 3-year moratorium on new charters that can be located within 1-mile of a traditional public school building that has been closed or when school districts consolidate unless the local school board gives approval. The proposal does provide for a waiver process of the moratorium by the Commissioner.
The second is a limit on the growth of lease aid funding to 3% a year. This limitation would have profound and significant impact on charters if overall enrollment in charters grew more than 3% a year. This year overall enrollment in charters grew by 15% - so if the limitation would have been in effect, every school would have seen a major reduction in lease aid funding.
Comment:
Even if we are able to remove this limitation from the final legislation - and every effort is going to be put forth to do so, it is clear that charter schools are going to have to be more aggressive in negotiating more favorable lease terms, as the issue of the growth of lease aid funding is not going to disappear –it has become a biennial issue on the legislative docket.
In terms of overall K-12 education funding, the Senate bill reduces basic education funding by 3.5% each of the next two years and caps growth on a number of categorical programs – like lease aid. The Senate does not do any shifts or other accounting schemes; it does the cuts and then anticipates adding funding when the economic crisis is over.
The House Bill
Last night the House K-12 bill passed the last committee and is now on the agenda for the House to pass the bill either today or tomorrow. This bill also contains all of the major provisions we have been actively working on relative to charter school accountability and innovation. There are no provisions that are problematic for charter schools.
In terms of overall K-12 education funding, the House takes a radically different approach than the Senate. While it does not cut overall funding, it does propose a major shift in the 90-10% hold back formula to a 73-27% formula. The net result of this shift is that school districts and charters will have to use reserves, borrow or obviously make cuts to balance budgets in 2009-2010. Basically schools would have 17% less revenue in 2009-2010.
While the House bill does not cut overall funding, it does eliminate Q-Comp, and does not include any of the things the Governor proposed – like the Pay for Performance Plan and the virtual school.
The Conference Committee
It is expected that legislative leaders will name the members of the K-12 Education Conference Committee within a very short time after the House gives passage to its version of the Omnibus bill. Talk around the Capitol indicates that the conference committees will not be given a lot of time to finalize bills – so we can expect a short, but intensive period of negotiations between the House, Senate and Governor.
While we obviously do not know the final make-up of the K-12 Education Conference Committee, we do know that there are members who have spent a lot of time on the charter provisions lobbying to be on the committee. The charter school provisions are in sheer volume among the biggest in the bills, and any area where there is some language difference will still need to be negotiated between the two houses.
As soon as the members are named, we will let you know.
Eugene Piccolo