Community Councils!
Hooray! I passed my most important bill -- raising the amount of money going to local community councils! To get the background on what this money does, click (here).
The bill shot out of the House early and languished in the Senate. Several Senators had concerns that, someday, too much money would go directly to the community councils and that, instead, it should flow through the districts with the other education money. Thankfully, there is legitimacy to that concern; the permanent school fund (the source of the community council funding) is growing quite rapidly. The Senate amended the bill, to tie the upper-limit of community council funding to 1.5% of all spending on public education.
Tethering the rate to the minimum school program, like that, makes sense. But I thought the 1.5% was pegged too low. The House refused to concur with the Senate amendments. So, it went back to the Senate. The Senate refused to recede from its amendments. The issue, then, went to a conference committee.
I LOVE conference committees. It's my favorite thing to do up here, because it is when the process is most intense. Either the committee agrees on something that the two bodies will accept or the the bill dies. If the issue is important, like this one, members of the body send you off with encouragement and welcome you back with enthusiasm.
I picked Ron Bigelow (appropriations chair) and Brent Goodfellow (former minority leader) to serve with me to represent the House position. Because the Senate sponsor, Tom Hatch, was going to be on the committee and a Senate Democrat was going to be on the committee ( and the Democrats unanimously support lifting the cap), I knew we'd come out of committee in good shape. The key, though, was getting something the Senate would accept.
Karen Hale, minority caucus manager, and Bill Hickman, my Senator, rounded out the committee. The committee agreed on 2%, and both bodies approved it. This means that the amount of money going to community councils will increase, until it is 4-times the current level (the current level is 0.5% of the minimum school program, which currently happens to be 2.1 billion dollars). This is a great victory for local control and parental involvement in education!
A footnote for the future, however. The 2.0% mark likely will be reached in 20 years. At that point, I hope things will be going so well that people will wonder who the idiot is that decided only 2.0% should go to community councils. For the record, that would be me. Ron really wanted to send it to the bodies at 2.5%. Looking at the final vote counts, it likely would have passed at that rate. This is one where I hope things will progress so nicely that history curses my name for having played any role in limiting funding to those fantastic mom-, dad- and teacher-run community councils!
The bill shot out of the House early and languished in the Senate. Several Senators had concerns that, someday, too much money would go directly to the community councils and that, instead, it should flow through the districts with the other education money. Thankfully, there is legitimacy to that concern; the permanent school fund (the source of the community council funding) is growing quite rapidly. The Senate amended the bill, to tie the upper-limit of community council funding to 1.5% of all spending on public education.
Tethering the rate to the minimum school program, like that, makes sense. But I thought the 1.5% was pegged too low. The House refused to concur with the Senate amendments. So, it went back to the Senate. The Senate refused to recede from its amendments. The issue, then, went to a conference committee.
I LOVE conference committees. It's my favorite thing to do up here, because it is when the process is most intense. Either the committee agrees on something that the two bodies will accept or the the bill dies. If the issue is important, like this one, members of the body send you off with encouragement and welcome you back with enthusiasm.
I picked Ron Bigelow (appropriations chair) and Brent Goodfellow (former minority leader) to serve with me to represent the House position. Because the Senate sponsor, Tom Hatch, was going to be on the committee and a Senate Democrat was going to be on the committee ( and the Democrats unanimously support lifting the cap), I knew we'd come out of committee in good shape. The key, though, was getting something the Senate would accept.
Karen Hale, minority caucus manager, and Bill Hickman, my Senator, rounded out the committee. The committee agreed on 2%, and both bodies approved it. This means that the amount of money going to community councils will increase, until it is 4-times the current level (the current level is 0.5% of the minimum school program, which currently happens to be 2.1 billion dollars). This is a great victory for local control and parental involvement in education!
A footnote for the future, however. The 2.0% mark likely will be reached in 20 years. At that point, I hope things will be going so well that people will wonder who the idiot is that decided only 2.0% should go to community councils. For the record, that would be me. Ron really wanted to send it to the bodies at 2.5%. Looking at the final vote counts, it likely would have passed at that rate. This is one where I hope things will progress so nicely that history curses my name for having played any role in limiting funding to those fantastic mom-, dad- and teacher-run community councils!
posted by steve u. at 2/24/2005
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