Stay vigilant, team! The conference committee is being resurrected to deal with the education/SPED budget since SB 387 failed the Senate. The right thing would be to reject Rep. Williams’s practice of hearing multiple policy bills in the K-12 Education Budget Committee, refusing to work them separately during the session and send them on to the floor of the House and then the Senate, which is the normal process for bills. Instead, her committee works them at the very end of the session with a series of amendments known in advance only to the other Republicans on the committee and with minimal opportunity to understand, let alone fix, the problems with them. Then she crams them all together with the budget and does a gut and go completely removing the Senate from the process until the very end of the session where it all gets addressed by a conference committee of 3 Representatives and 3 Senators. The rest of the legislature then gets the whole package without sufficient time to parse through the contents and without opportunity to amend the bills. They are accurately threatened that if they vote against the bill, they’ll get accused of voting against funding education and SPED (because the budget is tied to the bad policy). This is a completely unacceptable way of handling educational policy but she has gotten away with it for years. We are thankful for the members of the Senate who were willing to admit they didn’t really know what was in the bill or support this process and voted it down last night.

We need them to continue to hold strong and ask for a clean education budget bill or just add the education budget to the omnibus budget bill like every other area of the budget. Under no circumstances should they vote for a bill that conditionally funds SPED based on some accounting gimmick that blocks continued efforts to fill in the SPED funding hole. Our students need the legislature to fund general education and SPED, and making progress on general education while continuing to underfund SPED is not a solution.

Published on Facebook on April 5th, 2024.