Senate Ways and Means Committee Report

Really interesting stuff out of the Senate Ways and Means Committee work session the other day; it's worth going through the committee documents and seeing what was talked about. The most important one from a K-12 perspective was called "Considerations in Making Additional Budget Reductions" which says that there's only 9% of the education budget that can even be looked at for reductions (about $635 million), which sounds good until you realize that 1) the deficit the state is looking at is about twice that number and 2) that $635 million includes all of levy equalization, all the K-4 class size reduction money, everything that's left of I-728, and what we currently spend on full-day kindergarten.

That said, I've got my own ideas (school district consolidation, NBPTS certification, LASER, ProCert) that probably fall in the other 91%, but they could be real savings if the political will was there.

It's going to be an interesting session.