February 14, 2011
The funding and policy control of Iowa schools are slated to get significant attention in the state Legislature this week.
On the Senate side, majority Democrats plan to move ahead with a 2 percent increase in base per-pupil funding for Iowa’s 359 K-12 public school districts, an amount that backers say will provide about $65 million in extra state money to stave off teacher layoffs. It also would give schools new funds to keep pace with rising costs while holding down property tax increases in districts with declining enrollments.
That would put them in conflict with the Republican-run House, which has joined Gov. Terry Branstad in advocating a zero “allowable growth” position while providing up to $216 million in relief to property owners who have been asked to pay higher taxes to support public education.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said Democrats will “fight very hard” to get increased funding for education, noting that there has never been a year since the school foundation formula’s inception that lawmakers and the governor agreed to provide no base state aid increase.
Majority House Republicans issued Thursday the spending targets that they will use this week to begin building a $6 billion budget for fiscal 2012 that is based on no K-12 state aid increase, setting up an early showdown of educational funding that will signal the likely direction of budget negotiations on a host of thorny decisions that lawmakers must address yet this session.
“We’re working through how we resolve these disputes,” House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, said. “ That (K-12 allowable growth) is a line item that’s staying at status quo. Most line items aren’t going to be protected at status quo.”
Another budget dispute is likely to rage over the treatment that Senate Democrats give House File 45, the GOP-titled “Taxpayers First Act” that included cuts to state-funded preschool, smoking cessation, regent faculty sabbaticals and other areas that a Senate subcommittee stripped while preparing for action this week in the Senate Appropriations Committee. So far, there is tentative bipartisan agreement to create a searchable, transparent state budget database but little else.
State Sen. Bob Dvorsky, D-Coralville, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he expects Democrats will release their fiscal 2012 budget targets and their tax-relief proposals this week, and hopefully they, legislative Republicans and Branstad can agree on a mutual starting point before they forge ahead with different spending plans. Democrats are not inclined to go along with Branstad’s call for a two-year budget, which legislative Republicans support, he added.
On the education policy side, the GOP-led House is expected to debate a measure designed to give local school districts home rule similar to what cities and counties have. House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer, R-Garner, said schools now are told what they can do by state officials and “everything else they can’t do.” The House wants to “flip it” so, like cities and counties under home rule, the approach will be to enumerated what schools cannot do, but all other policy decisions will be made at the local level.
“They have elected school boards, and those folks can make the decisions on many, many things that today they are having to come to the Department of Education for,” Upmeyer said. “It just makes sense that if we want innovati on and if we want creativity, that seems like one way to get it.”
However, passage of House File 260 could doom an effort under way in the Senate Education Committee to expand from 90 to 180 days the period of time an athlete must sit out of varsity sports competition when transferring to another school. Iowa is among a minority of states that has a 90-day ineligibility period for high school varsity athletes who move from a district of residence to a different school district using open enrollment or transfer provisions, but Senate File 74 seeks to require that a transferring student sit out a full year of eligibility before competing at a new school.
Giving local schools home rule authority to make their own policy decisions would negate the need to take up the athletic ineligibility issue, said state Rep. Greg Forristall, R-Council Bluffs, the chairman of the House Education Committee.
“We think we don’t have to legislate everything,” he said after pulling the issue from a committee agenda last week. “We have a lot of issues that we need to weigh in on, and we don’t want to interfere with local control that much.”
Also this week, the House Transportation Committee is slated to take up a bill establishing parameters for cities that use traffic monitoring and enforcement cameras. The proposal’s three components would address signage, caps on civil citations and due process provisions. While cities would be allowed to use cameras to ticket drivers for speeding and red light violations, as is now the case in Davenport, Paulsen said he supports “putting some boundaries” on the automated enforcement systems.
Senate GOP Leader Paul McKinley of Chariton said he hopes the pace of legislative action picks up this week, noting that the Senate has passed five items in the sess ion’s first five weeks and that only one was substantive legislation.
“As we get ever closer to the halfway point of the 2011 session, the Iowa Senate is becoming known more for what it has not done than what it has this session,” he noted. “Precious little of the people’s business has been accomplished. This Senate, under Democratic control, has not earned its keep, and the people of this state have every reason to be frustrated.”
Senate President Jack Kibbie, D-Emmetsburg, said this year’s session is fairly typical and that standing committees need time to consider bills and gather public comment in subcommittee proceedings.
Gronstal said the pace of floor debate will begin to pick up this week, and as far as the Republicans’ criticism goes, he said, “I pass every good idea they come up with. So far, I haven’t seen a lot.”