House Republicans joined together last week to pass, on a strong vote, a rescission bill for the 2009 fiscal year in an effort to address a growing cash deficit for the current year. The Senate had passed its rescission bill earlier, but the House plan goes much further in protecting the most vulnerable Kansans, those with developmental and physical disabilities.
The total expenditure adjustments, including cuts and transfers, are a little over $300M and are intended to fill the deficit hole in the current year and maintain a modest ending balance going into next fiscal year. Although we worked closely with school district administrators on proposed cuts in K-12 funding the teachers’ union protested cuts of any amount, arguing that necessary cuts should come from other agencies, including social services, corrections, higher education and veterans. Had the House bent to the will of the teachers’ union, and held K-12 harmless from cuts, the result would certainly have meant even higher tuitions, release of inmates, suspension of some parolee supervision, a freeze on assistance for the physically and developmentally disabled and some state employee furloughs.
The House did restore $22 per pupil to cuts in base state aid for schools to soften the loss to schools in the current school year. The school cuts amounted to $66 to the base. This allowed us to provide a total of $16.4M in additional funding for the physically and developmentally disabled waivers and also allowed us to provide a greater amount of funding back to local units of government. I’ve been disappointed by the tone of e-mails we’ve received from some in the education community, administrators not included. Many communications were, frankly, unprofessional and fraught with factual errors. In fairness to the senders, it appeared most e-mail communications were form e-mails suggested by the union, who requested that teachers flood legislators’ computers with them. Many had spelling and grammatical errors.
In working with school administrators we learned what their options were and what additional options were needed. For example, statewide, school districts have a cumulative total of some $119M in contingency reserves, some districts having more than others. That alone is over half of the total current cash deficit of the state and K-12 education is 51% of the state budget. The Governor’s proposed budget would sweep many agency fee funds to balance the budget. We will NOT propose to sweep education surplus funds. We have agreed to allow schools as much flexibility as possible this current year, understanding that they are close to finishing up the current school year. The Legislature’s commitment to schools remains solid, to the point that K-12 education will share a small fraction of the cuts that other worthy agencies will suffer.
The 2009 budget bill is now in Conference Committee to work out the differences between the House & Senate versions. We anticipate the Senate will accept our proposal on schools but they are thus far reluctant to accept our position for more funds for the physically and developmentally disabled.