SB 2017-142: Return Education to the Regions Act (Passed)

[Anna Komnene]

I'm concerned about the 25% cut too. Also what does it mean? We haven't had an official budget yet have we? Does that mean that 25% of whatever gets allocated to education in the committee right now gets cut?

[Anna Komnene]

I don't much like the idea of bringing this bill to a vote when there seems to be Senators who'd like to amend the bill differently. I can say that I will be a nay on the bill as is.

I could propose an amendment myself but it would be along the lines of striking the entirety of section 3, so I've been hesitant to do so. If another Senator would like to propose something different, I'm all ears.

I wonder if we might want to make some additions to the curriculum part. I get that the idea is to leave a lot of leeway to the regions to decide, but I feel like American history, at the very least, should be a national (and not a regional) requirement for all students to take.

[Anna Komnene]

I'm very skeptical that this bill is going to help the poor. It cuts 25% of the education budget which serves over 14,000 public school districts according to the census and reallocates the money to building equipment in 50 of them. That is less than one percent of the school districts in the whole country. I understand that a lot of the education budget comes from the local level but that doesn't mean they aren't getting federal help and when they lose that help, they'll be under a big burden to figure out a way to cover that lost money.

What exactly are the rest of the 99% of schools to do when they receive this massive cut? I'd guess this would likely see thousands of teachers losing their jobs - who btw aren't people who tend to make very much money for their contributions to society. I've been around education long enough to know that the first people to go when budgets are cut are always the teachers. In fact, I have teacher friends who've been let go three different times due to budget cuts before finally finding a district where they were able to stick. It doesn't have anything to do with teacher quality. It's just whoever happens to be at the bottom of the totem pole. When you decide that it's no longer necessary to teach Spanish or Art, that means letting go Spanish and Art teachers. Even Math and English departments suffer from this kind of thing when districts decide that they have too many teachers than they can afford and that leads to students having larger class sizes.

I guess this might be workable if we dramatically lower the percent cut and also dramatically raise the number of districts allocated to, but I'm still very wary of what's going to happen to the districts that aren't included that won't be seeing anything from this bill other than a likelihood of dramatic decreases of any federal support they might be getting.

[Anna Komnene]

I think there's probably four paths forward here (there might be more )

1. We lower the cut and raise the number of districts helped by the re-allocation - or redefine the way it's allocated to have the DoE/SoIA define a poverty threshold with districts that meet that criteria receiving the money.

2. We scrap section 3 entirely and replace it with a scheme for impoverished districts to apply for grants to receive more money from the DoE/SoIA.

3. We scrap section 3 entirely and don't replace it with anything.

4. If people are totally opposed to the bill, we just vote it down.

And beyond that we might want to consider some amendments to the curriculum regarding science and/or history.

[Anna Komnene]

Okay, I'll take a poke at the curriculum while we think about the other stuff. I'm also wondering what exactly this "career course" for 4 years would be. I didn't have anything like that in my school.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[/quote]
Sponsor Feedback: Awaiting feedback
Status:

[Anna Komnene]

Gotcha. Thanks for reminding me. Am I supposed to let you handle the amendments in these threads PiT? Oops!

[Anna Komnene]

I'll introduce this amendment once we get done with the current one to clarify things, give the department and regions more time to prepare and reduce the amount cut to 10%.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Anna Komnene]

Formally introducing the amendment now.