UndertheDome

The 2007-08 legislative session is under way, and CSBA’s Governmental Relations staff is analyzing the potential impacts of bills pertinent to education. The association’s Legislative Committee has adopted the following positions on significant bills so far. The bills are all awaiting their first committee hearings.

AB 168 (Berg) School facilities: New construction: minimum essential facilities

This bill would require the Office of Public School Construction and the superintendent of public instruction to establish standards for minimum essential facilities, including minimum square footage requirements for K-12 and school sites, and would require the State Allocation Board to adopt regulations incorporating those standards. The state currently does not have a definition of “minimum essential facilities.”

CSBA Position: Support

AB 183 (Coto) Pupils: High school graduation; voter registration

This bill would require, commencing with the 2009-10 school year, that each pupil register to vote as a condition of graduation from high school if the pupil otherwise meets the requirements to vote, subject to some exceptions. The pupil would be responsible for registering to vote and submitting proof of registration to the school. Essentially, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program in that the school district will be required to verify a pupil’s compliance with these provisions before the pupil is allowed to graduate.

CSBA Position: Oppose

AB 260 (Fuller) School facilities: Supplemental funding; project management assistance

This bill would authorize school districts with an average daily attendance of 2,500 or fewer pupils in the prior school year to request supplemental funding assistance from the State Allocation Board in order to manage new construction or modernization projects approved by the board after Jan. 1, 2008.

CSBA Position: Support

SB 69 (Runner)/AB 146 (Smyth) School districts: Reorganization of large districts

SB 69 and AB 146 contain the same language and call for the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Specifically, the bills would require the reorganization of any unified school district enrolling at least 500,000 pupils into several school districts enrolling no more than 50,000 pupils, by July 1, 2011. Both bills would require the establishment of a commission to aid in the reorganization process. The bill would limit administrative costs in the new districts to the percentage of total funds used for those purposes in the existing district two years prior to reorganization.

CSBA Position: Oppose

SB 133 (Aanestad) Federal forest reserve funds: Short-term loans

This bill would authorize the state controller during the 2006-07 fiscal year to issue loans from the general fund to a school district, a county superintendent of schools on behalf of a school district, or a community college district that has requested that loan from the superintendent of public instruction in order to provide short-term relief to the district based on a delay in the receipt of federal forest reserve funding. The district receiving a loan would be required to repay the loan in full, plus interest, on or before June 30, 2008.

CSBA Position: Support if amended to: change the window period for applications; include counties as a party eligible to receive a loan; tie the loan amount to the amount provided in the final December 2006 federal payment; change the “must pay back by” date to Jan. 1, 2009; eliminate the “paying back with interest” provision; and change the timing for the processing of applications.

SB 146 (Scott)/AB 73 (Dymally) School finance: Attendance and enrollment

Both SB 146 and AB 73 strive to accomplish the same goal: shifting the basis for revenue limit funding from average daily attendance to average monthly enrollment. However, the bills approach the shift differently. Beginning with the 2008-09 school year, SB 146 would change funding for school district revenue limits from attendance-based to enrollment-based, using average monthly enrollment. To facilitate this shift, SB 146 calls for a one-time adjustment to school district revenue limits based upon the 2006-07 relationship between active enrollment and ADA.

AB 73 would redefine ADA to mean AME by specifying that a school’s ADA would be the sum of the active enrollment figures reported by the school divided by the number of months those figures were calculated. AB 73 would also provide a mechanism to ensure that schools and districts still focus on student attendance.

CSBA Position: Support and seek amendments to address migrant student populations

SB 155 (Maldonado) Instructional programs: The Online Classroom Pilot Program

This bill would reinstate the Online Classroom Program that ended Jan 1, with the following changes: (1) require that a teacher of an online course under the program be a highly qualified teacher, as defined under the No Child Left Behind Act; (2) eliminate the restrictions on the numbers of school sites and percentage of pupils that are permitted to participate in the program; (3) decrease to 120 the number of minutes of attendance in traditional in-classroom instruction that constitutes a day of attendance for apportionment purposes for a pupil participating part time in online instruction under the program; (4) eliminate the requirement that the superintendent of public instruction convene a working group to assess the program and the requirement that the state controller review the program, and (5) remove the term “Pilot” from the program name.

CSBA Position: Support