The Legislature will vote today on a bill establishing Gov. Brown’s historic school funding system that punts to the State Board of Education some key decisions on how dollars for disadvantaged students must be spent and accounted for.
The language for implementing the Local Control Funding Formula is SB 91.
Senate Bill 91, the 178-page “trailer” bill containing statutory changes for Gov. Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula, was released Thursday, one day before lawmakers must vote on the $96 billion state budget that includes funding for the new system. Its provisions won’t satisfy advocates for disadvantaged children who had called for restrictions tightly tying funding to targeted students along with detailed information on how every school spends its money. But the bill also may not please districts that wanted broad district control over allocations under the LCFF. The bill indicates the solution – that extra dollars must be spent “in proportion” to the high-needs students who generate them – is somewhere in between.
“We tried to thread the needle,” said Rick Simpson, deputy chief of staff to Assembly Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles.
To be more accurate, lawmakers will be handing the thread and the needle to the State Board (better throw in a thimble for the pain), which, under SB 91, will have until Jan. 31, 2014, to write