Citing impact of budget cuts, Education Coalition says voters should decide on taxes
Published: February 1, 2011
Representatives of the Education Coalition briefed the news media today about the effects of $18 billion in budget cuts to K-12 education over the past three years, and they urged support for a June ballot measure that would allow voters to decide whether to extend several temporary taxes to stave off additional devastating cuts.
Leading off a press conference that was moderated by Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators, CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations Rick Pratt set the tone. Pratt used a chart to show annual shortfalls of around $10 billion between Proposition 98’s constitutionally minimum school funding guarantee and actual funding received each year since 2008-09.
Citing reports from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the Department of Finance, the California Budget Project and school districts throughout the state, Pratt went on to refute a recent study by Pepperdine University researchers that schools are sufficiently funded.
“To make that kind of claim in the face overwhelming evidence to contrary is a little bit like saying the world is flat, and it deserves as much recognition as that,” Pratt said.
Debbie Look, the California State PTA’s director of legislation, Estelle Lemieux, a legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association, and Steve Henderson, a legislative advocate for the California School Employees Association, also spoke. They explained the burden that deferred payments of state funding have on schools and compared ratios of students to teachers, counselors, librarian and administrators in California and other states—with California ranking no better than 47th among all 50 states in each category.
Programmatic cuts, lost cost-of-living increases, and deferrals over the past three years have left schools facing the prospect of receiving just 56 cents per dollar owed in 2011-12 under Gov. Brown’s budget proposal, Henderson said. “For us to only be funding our educational program at 56 cents on the dollar, there’s something wrong with that.”
Speakers endorsed Gov. Jerry Brown’s call in his State of the State address Monday for the state Legislature to authorize a special election in June to allow voters to decide whether several temporary taxes should be extended to avoid another round of deep cuts beginning July 1. ACSA’s Wells called the prospect that those revenues would be lost in the 2011-12 school year “frightening.”