I learned two things last Saturday.That's when the state Republican Party's convention removed all mention of support for state-funded pre-kindergarten from their platform.
First, pre-K is a live wire. A lot of people in this state back it strongly -- including many Republicans. The voice vote to remove the wording was far from unanimous. Second, and related to the first, is that the GOP's fear that pre-K is now considered a mandate is well-founded. A large and vocal number of people clearly believe pre-K is more than just a sound education strategy. It's a right.
I support pre-K, but haven't forgotten the debates of 2003. That's when state-funded pre-K was created. There's no legal mandate for it. The state Constitution requires the state maintain a "general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools." That is defined in law as kindergarten through 12th grade. Offering pre-K was an all-too-rare attempt of your state government to get right at the root of a problem.
Hammered by the state Supreme Court back then for an inadequate school system, the Legislature looked at what would help the most rather than what was legally required. They offered poor kids state-supported pre-K. "Poor" was defined as those children living in families within 200 percent of the long-outdated federal guideline for living in poverty.
There simply wasn't enough taxpayer money, or support for raising more, to give every poor kid in the state access to pre-K. The Legislature gave the idea $111 million back in 2003. There the amount of the appropriation sat until last year, when the state put in another $3 million. That's about $13 million short of what would have been needed just to account for the effect of inflation over the preceding 12 years.
Between the state program, the federal "Head Start" program and private efforts, about 26,500 of the estimated 45,000 poor kids who would qualify for pre-K under the "200 percent of poverty" level get it. So, by rough math, it would take about $200 million total from the state to expand pre-K to every poor kid.
I'd vote for that. I'd certainly vote for that before yet another automatic tax cut that gets passed nowadays every time there's a state budget surplus. Arkansas seems devoted to following the same supply-side formulas that even the national Republican Party doesn't support any more. But I'd support pre-K because it's a good idea, not to fulfill an obligation. To me, it's largely self-evident that it saves money, time and frustration when kids go into the regular grades knowing their shapes and colors.
Republicans might support pre-K, too. They just want to be asked. Yeah, I doubt it, too, but that's the argument. I'd also point out that the amount allocated to pre-K didn't get raised when Democrats ran things either.
It also needs mentioning that Saturday's convention was the final step in adopting a platform, a 10-page document that a sizable committee worked on for weeks. In this final stage, rewrites were not allowed. The delegates could strike things and make grammatical corrections. That's it. The option of writing some kinder, gentler statement that was generally supportive of pre-K wasn't an option. It says something about the degree of support for pre-K among Republicans that this language got as far as it did and was only struck at the absolute last chance to do so.
Also, the convention cut another provision, one supporting the state's earned income tax credit. Tom Lundstrum Jr. of Springdale proposed that change and I neglected to mention it in my news account.
While I'm clearing up things, I'm quite pleased to report that the proposed constitutional amendment restricting lawsuit damages in nursing home cases isn't quite as awful as I thought.
I wrote last week that the amendment would tie non-monetary damages to actual monetary ones, setting up a ratio between them. Dan Greenberg, an amendment supporter, called me up and said that the proposed ration was in the original version of the amendment but was cut out later. Proponents sent the first draft to the state attorney general, who approved a ballot title the proponents didn't like. So they wrote a new version of the measure and a ballot title that reflected the change. That was the final, approved version of the proposed amendment.
Commentary on 08/13/2016