Delegate Assembly hears about local control, funding forecasts
Published: June 1, 2006
Local educators’ lobbying on behalf of public schoolchildren is paying off at the state level, but much work remains to be done there and in Washington, D.C., CSBA President Luan B. Rivera and Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin told the association’s semi-annual Delegate Assembly in Sacramento last month.
“Because of your efforts, the governor seems to have a very different attitude and to be much more open to supporting our schools and increasing funding,” Rivera said of Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the results of the governor’s annual budget revisions had not been announced at the time the Delegate Assembly met, Rivera spoke confidently of a “more cooperative spirit” allowing education representatives to focus more on policy.
However, new threats to local control continue to emerge, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposed end-run around the elected trustees of the Los Angeles Unified School District is just one example. Villaraigosa is pushing for state authority to conduct a six-year experiment that would give him control of most district operations.
“Decisions on education reform are being made without school boards” around the country, Rivera warned. “We are being circumvented.” She traced the threat all the way to Washington, where President Bush has proposed $100 million for vouchers in 2007 and cutbacks in public school funding.
“We also see evidence of that when our state Board of Education approves state benefit charter schools that have permission to open throughout the state without any local control or local input,” Rivera added.
In his Executive Director’s report, Plotkin shared Rivera’s optimism about funding as well as her concern about local control. Speaking prior to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s newest budget revisions, Plotkin noted that state tax receipts are running far ahead of projections. The Education Coalition, made up of CSBA and a half-dozen other groups, is seeking half of all new state revenues in partial payment toward some $3.2 billion owed to public education.
“The good news for schools is that a large part of what is owed to us right now can be paid with one-time money,” Plotkin said. “The challenge is going to be, if we get that money, that the Legislature and the governor don’t tie too many strings to it, so that you are not able to exercise discretionary judgment about what you need to spend the money on.”
Plotkin urged grassroots lobbying to confront legislators and administration officials with three points:
- The $3.2 billion is owed to schools as a direct result of an agreement between the Education Coalition and Schwarzenegger – which was adopted by state Legislature as Chapter 213 of the Education Code of 2004 and signed by the governor – to suspend Proposition 98 funding guarantees;
- Schools made many cuts to cope with the lack of funding; so
- The money should not be encumbered by any restrictions on how it is used once it is repaid.
“Don’t … tell us how to spend the money when it comes. Let us make that decision,” Plotkin urged district officials to insist. “We need to do a better job of telling legislators about the support system for kids that we have had to decimate over the years.”
Plotkin also updated Delegates about the outreach effort CSBA is conducting as part of long-range efforts to determine what is needed to adequately fund a public education system equal to the world-class standards California has enacted and to equitably distribute that funding throughout the state.
“We have been able to meet with an awful lot of very important decision-makers,” Plotkin said. “From the left to the right, business and labor, everybody that you could possibly imagine is on this list. And there is a consensus beginning to build, that if you push away political posturing, you actually do get people thinking thoughtfully about the real problems of schools.”
Results of CSBA’s project and related research efforts are expected around the end of the year. “2007 could be extraordinary,” Plotkin said.
Policies and nominations
The 247 Delegates and members of the CSBA Board of Directors in attendance also considered proposed amendments to CSBA’s Policy Platform. Meeting in breakout sessions to facilitate small-group discussions, the Delegates reviewed 50 proposals submitted by school board members throughout the state to refine the association’s stance on critical issues. The Policy Platform Committee will report on the Delegates’ recommendations to CSBA’s Board of Directors in September, when the Board will make its own recommendations on policy changes. The proposals will come back to the Delegate Assembly for final action Nov. 29-30 in San Francisco prior to CSBA’s Annual Education Conference.
Elections for CSBA’s President-elect and Vice President will also take place then. The deadline for nominating candidates is June 12. For more information, contact Shelley Cody at scody@csba.org.
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