Good news changes Legislative Action agenda 

Encouraged by news that the governor and state lawmakers had reached agreement on a $10.4 billion facilities bond just days earlier, California School Board members met in the state capital for the association’s Legislative Action Conference May 7-8.

The association’s legislative conference gave participants the opportunity to hear from national education and policy experts, get up-to-the-minute political updates from CSBA legislative advocates and meet with colleagues from neighboring regions and elsewhere in the state. Legislative action attendees also met face-to-face with their elected representatives, delivering local perspectives on charter schools, the state budget, Proposition 98 and mayoral takeovers.

Originally, the importance of putting together a state facilities bond to build, repair and modernize schools was also near the top of the legislative agenda for the conference.

But just days before the conference convened, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the Legislature agreed to set aside their partisan differences and put a bond measure on the November ballot with the passage of Assembly Bill 127. If approved by voters, the measure would allocate $7.3 billion is for K-12 facilities, including $1.9 billion for new school construction and $3.3 billion for modernization.

“CSBA is very pleased with the contents of AB 127, since it addresses our major concerns in a positive way,” said Rick Pratt, CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations.

The good news changed the legislative agenda for the conference: instead of urging lawmakers to pass a bond, many Legislative Action participants instead thanked their representatives for voting yes.

“If your representatives didn’t support the bond, I’ll leave it up to you whether to complain,” said Pratt.

Pratt told Legislative Action participants that it seemed likely that schools would benefit from robust tax revenues and he was optimistic that the governor was ready to make good on the promise he made to education during the budget crisis of 2004. In fact, just days after Pratt delivered that optimistic prediction the governor announced that his revised May budget for 2006-07 would boost school spending by a cumulative $5 billion over the next seven years.

Other legislative issues on this year’s Legislative Action agenda included:

• the need to give local districts and other authorizing agents more flexibility when considering whether to grant charter school petitions by passing Assembly Bill 2954 by Carol Liu, D-La Cañada Flintridge; and
• the threat posed by recent mayoral attempts to usurp the authority of locally elected school boards: specifically the current campaign by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to greatly diminish the authority of the elected school board.

The latest Villaraigosa proposal would give the mayor sweeping new powers, establish a council of mayors to help run the district and, critics said, would disenfranchise local voters. Los Angeles Democratic Sen. Gloria Romero has introduced legislation to study the issue that focused exclusively on L.A.

“Although the issue is focused on Los Angeles, the question of who should run our districts – the mayor and city hall or locally elected boards – has ramifications for everyone,” Pratt told participants. “You need to make it clear to your representative that you do care how they vote on this issue.”

Jo Ann Yee, CSBA Senior Director for Strategy Development, Achievement, Diversity and Urban Affairs, said takeover advocates are essentially saying that everyone has the right to an elected school board; everyone, that is, except residents of urban districts.

“This weakens the democratic process,” she said. “Why are we wasting time and money on something that is patently unconstitutional? Los Angeles has a strategic plan and is on the right track. What L.A. needs is the time and stability to let those reforms work, and that’s something all districts need.”