Gov. Brown agrees not to hold back money from California schools next year
California school districts won’t have to wait an extra year to get nearly $1 billion in one-time funding, as Gov. Jerry Brown proposed last month. And after-school and summer program providers will see their first funding increase in more than a decade, under the terms of the 2017-18 state budget that legislative leaders and the Brown administration negotiated last week.
The Legislature must pass the proposed $126 billion state budget by Thursday to meet a constitutional deadline. Schools and community colleges will get a sizable share of the funding increase. Funding under Proposition 98, the formula that determines K-12 and community colleges’ share of state revenue, will rise $3.1 billion – 4.4 percent – to $74.5 billion. School districts’ share of the increase will be $2.8 billion.
In his revised May budget, Brown proposed giving schools about $600 million more than the minimum funding that Prop. 98 required, but he called for withholding $1 billion in one-time funding until May 2019 to make sure that revenue projected for next year actually comes in. Brown, who has long warned a recession is imminent, said it would be better to wait than to retroactively cut school funding in the middle of the year.
But Assembly and Senate budget negotiators didn’t like that idea any more than education groups, which said thatGov. Brown agrees not to hold back money from California schools next year | EdSource: