Friends,

This week we have taken up several finance and policy bills as the House and Senate get ready to finalize the budget. Education was Monday, and more aggravating than I thought it should be.

While working through spending $18 billion dollars in surplus funding, democrats are boasting how heavy they are increasing the pupil formula for k-12 students. The “generous” increase is respectively 4% in the first year, and 5% the following.

However, the democrats deceivingly tied the increase in education funding, and their new policy mandates, directly to a new increase in hourly pay and unemployment benefits to seasonal employee’s.

Local school districts will be forced to cover all of the overages from their general fund for new mandated unemployment benefits for previously seasonal work, and will not be able to levy to make up the difference. (Ed Chair admits 2% swipe of Education Funding)

There are other issues with the bill, like ZERO dollars to secure our schools. Further a paltry amount of money has been offered for successful early literacy, and democrats completely missed the mark and are underfunding the special education cross subsidy with a roughly 45% increase, the Republican plan offers $100 million for early literacy, and a 65% match of the cross subsidy.

This session is almost over, Democrats have now spent all of the $18 billion, and all we have to look forward to are new fees and higher taxes for the people, and flagrantly expensive and unfunded mandates.