The House and Senate Education committees are in limbo after not voting as expected Monday on whether to expunge a recommendation for a $20 million increase in annual special education funding.
The heads of the committees then called off today's scheduled meeting, at which members were to continue discussing their overall report on public school funding and educational adequacy. The House committee chairman says the panels were "sidetracked" by the special education funding issue.
The educational adequacy report helps determine how more than $3 billion in public education funding should be spent by districts and whether there should be any increase to ensure an equitable and adequate education for the state's 476,000 public school children, regardless of what district they are in.
The report is due Nov. 1 and required because of laws passed in the aftermath of a series of Arkansas Supreme Court decisions on educating children in kindergarten through 12th grade. The Legislature will consider the report when it begins meeting in January in regular session.
The special education funding recommendation, approved by the joint education committees last week, calls for a $20 million annual increase to the "catastrophic fund," a program that reimburses schools for educating students with severe disabilities. There's currently $11 million a year placed in the fund, but it has about $30 million a year in eligible expenses.
Last week, Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, made the motion to recommend increasing funding. He served as the chairman of the Legislative Task Force on the Best Practices for Special Education, which supported the increase.
By Friday, House Speaker Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, had called for the expungement vote. He said the Oct. 3 meeting where the recommendation was approved was poorly attended and not everyone understood what they were voting on.
But Monday, House Education Committee Chairman Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, said there were not enough votes in favor of expungement. He said the funding recommendation traditionally had not been included in the adequacy report and was not supposed to be part of the report.
"I would like to expunge the vote on everything we did last week and start it all over," Cozart said. "That's what I would have liked to have done, but I think we would have had some opposition to that."
Gillam said attendance wasn't as high as it needed to be.
"The whole point of me doing it was because there was a bunch of us that were gone last week. I didn't want to do the same thing to the folks that were gone this week," he said after Monday's meeting. "We'll take this up another time. There's a lot of conversations going on with this whole process. It's very fluid."
House Minority Leader Michael John Gray, D-Augusta, declined to say whether or not a compromise was in the works.
"Everyone in the room understands that special education and catastrophic funding are something we need to take a look at," he said. "Hopefully there's room for discussion."
Lindsey said any delay on the expungement vote is an accomplishment considering the report's deadline.
"The motion's still in place," he said. "Maybe it's a [temporary] victory, but it's a victory nonetheless."
Funding and taxes
While committee members have been working on a blueprint for education funding, Gov. Asa Hutchinson has called for an income tax cut.
For every $2 more per student the state provides, the total state budget increases by $1 million. The state currently provides $6,646 per student, per year from kindergarten through 12th grade.
In the wake of past multiple legal challenges involving the now-defunct Lake View School District, the state's Supreme Court found that Arkansas did not provide an equitable or adequate education to students.
The House and Senate education committees were charged with ensuring "equal educational opportunity for an adequate education," under Arkansas Code Annotated 10-3-2102.
The educational adequacy report is how the Legislature complies with the court's mandate. It recommends the amount of state funding per student based on the cost of personnel, transportation, maintenance, facilities, books and other resources for operating a prototypical school of 500 students.
Lawmakers cannot consider the total cost to the state of ensuring an adequate education when compiling the report. Special education students are specifically included under that state law.
Hutchinson has said he believes the state could conservatively afford a $50 million-a-year income tax cut, even amid some economic uncertainty, but he hasn't yet decided how large of a tax cut he'll ask the General Assembly to pass during its legislative session next year.
"I think that always when you tell a governor, or budget director, or chair that you're going to spend $20 million, they probably cringe just right off," Cozart said after Monday's meeting, referring to the special education proposed funding increase.
Hearings for all state agencies' budgets begin today.
"The result of the adequacy committee is extraordinarily important to the strength of education in our state, but also it has budgetary impacts," the governor said in July to reporters.
Last week, Hutchinson said his top general revenue budget priority will be to fund educational adequacy requirements for the state's public school students, but he is waiting for the recommendations from the House and Senate Education committees.
Transportation
Because of the educational adequacy report's Nov. 1 deadline, a plan to stop funding transportation on a per-student basis will likely be derailed, Cozart said.
Each school district receives $321.20 per student for transportation, but students cost different amounts to transport. The plan would shift toward funding based on actual cost.
Students concentrated in urban areas are cheaper to transport. Others spread out in rural areas take more time and fuel to pick up.
Therefore, the change would mean less money for urban districts -- which currently use the excess funds for other needs -- and more money for rural districts -- where dollars from other priorities have to be redirected to take students to school.
"I don't think we'll have time to get there this year," Cozart said. "It was one of my main goals, but I kinda got sidetracked on what we've messed up on."
He noted the plan could still come up in a future legislative session.
The transportation proposal, which is also supported by Gray, would affect how about $150 million is divvied up between districts.
Despite the work yet to be done on transportation and other issues, Cozart said there was no point meeting today, as scheduled.
"I don't think we have anything to do. After seeing the participation this morning, and quite a few people have already told me they couldn't be here tomorrow [due to budget hearings], and it just wasn't going to be enough to work on it," he said. "We'll get on track. I'll get 'em fired up."
Cozart said he did not yet know when he would schedule the next meeting.
A Section on 10/11/2016