CSBA urges grassroots advocacy for schools as deal on state budget appears near
Published: September 24, 2010
As rumors of a state budget deal swirled around the state Thursday, CSBA’s chief legislative advocate called for grassroots pressure to guard against public education taking yet another hit.
“The K-12 budget is likely once again to be the balancer for the overall budget,” CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations Rick Pratt warned at the outset of CSBA’s annual Back-to-School Webcast.
“The Legislature is going to once again come up with some creative ways to make it look as if they’ve fully funded Proposition 98, and therefore in their minds, fully funded the schools at the same time that we may be in store for some additional real cuts.”
Pratt summarized the two proposals, one laid out by the state Legislature’s Budget Conference Committee and the other spelled out in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s May Revision of his original proposal for the state’s 2010-11budget. The Conference Committee would dedicate $52 billion to Proposition 98’s minimum funding guarantee for K-14 education, $3 billion more than the governor’s plan.
“We’re probably looking at something that may be closer to the governor’s level in the May Revision, with the assumption that maybe we can make up for that with some of the federal money that’s coming in,” Pratt advised.
Those federal funds include the $1.2 billion for California in the Education Jobs Fund, passed by Congress this summer to help schools retain or hire school site-level personnel, as well as $271 million remaining for K-12 education in the state’s State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.
Federal restrictions, especially on the jobs funding, are supposed to ensure that states don’t reduce their own investments in education, but Pratt warned that the lack of a state budget “creates a huge opportunity for some real monkey business at the state level.”
“The outcome of the budget for schools is going to be better or worse depending on public involvement, public engagement,” Pratt said, especially with the entire state Assembly and half of the state Senate’s seats up for election less than six weeks from now.
“We need to be picking up the phone, we need to be talking to members of the Legislature—not just us here in Sacramento, but school board members around the state. If we turn up the volume and really make our concerns heard, the one thing we can say with certainty is that the outcome will be better that it otherwise would have been.”
Related links:
Review the status of the state budget deliberations
here.
Find out how to contact your state legislator
here.
Find talking points on California's state budget and education cuts
here.