The Legislature passed a state budget Sunday with a big funding increase for K-12 schools that pleased school district leaders and a last-minute statutory change that angered them.
The $61 billion in fiscal 2014-15 for Proposition 98, the formula setting K-12 and community college revenue, includes $4.75 billion more for implementing the Local Control Funding Formula that will raise per pupil spending nearly 10 percent, on average.
During a hurried hearing before the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee on Sunday, even the committee chairman, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who led the budget negotiations with the governor’s office, acknowledged, “ I can’t tell you why the governor made it (the cap on district reserves) such a high priority, that this is part of our overall agreement on the budget.” He said he would have preferred if the proposal had gone through the normal legislative process, where the potential impact could have been explored. “There’s no way I would have done it this way, but this is where we are now,” Leno said, before he and other committee members approved the language in AB 1463, the trailer bill on K-12 issues, by a 12-3 vote, sending it to the full Legislature for passage.
Sen. Mark Leno acknowledged that the proposal to restrict reserves deserved more extensive hearings. Source: webcast of Senate hearing.
For years, the Legislature has required that districts keep minimum reserves to stave off fiscal crises. Relaxed during the recession, next year it will be restored to between 1 percent of their budgets for Los Angeles Unified to 5 percent for small districts, with the average being 3 percent. But it has never imposed a maximum reserve, leaving it to each district to determine what’s Cap on district reserves passes despite lawmakers’ reservations | EdSource Today: