Educational report informative, challenging
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The Education and Local Government Interim committee, of which I am a member, recently met in Helena.
The first afternoon we heard numerous reports on the School Funding bill (SB175) that passed the legislature last session, including reports from several different-sized school districts and independent elementary districts.
There were two main discussion points. The first was the equality of funding with the increase in basic entitlements to each school district. The second point was the ability to spread the wealth from very rich districts with gas and oil money, to the less fortunate surrounding districts, by the concentric circle formula.
Education spending is one of the biggest pieces of the state funding pie. By state statute, education funding for the next biennium is started at base amount, which is the last budget amount plus an inflation factor. This is the minimum amount that Montana’s education system can be funded.
In the next session the committee received information on early childhood education. Governor Bullock has made the issue a top priority for the next legislature to take action on. We were given information and research about childhood brain development. From the National Conference of State Legislatures we learned about other states ideas and policies. The Office of Public Instruction and the Department of Public Health and Human Services then provided information on what is happening in Montana now.
There are a tremendous amount of questions that will need to be answered before this program is viable. The first, of course, is funding. Will this program be based in education or in social service? What sort of licensure and regulation is required and is there space for these programs? Should the state be involved in this issue or is it a parenting issue? These are just some of the questions that need to be resolved.
The committee also went over an overview of the process for Adoption or Amendment of Accreditation standards in K-12 schools. The Board of Public Education updates accreditation standards, following recommendations, from the Office of Public Education. This process has been brought to the forefront by the implementation of the Common Core curriculum. This process was started in May of 2011 and was finalized in July of 2013. The legislature’s only voice in this adoption is in the budgeting process. Under present law the cost for this is in the OPI budget that they expend to individual school districts. There is a spot for “substantial fiscal impact” to school district budgets. I expect that this is going to be a huge issue next session from both the monetary and policy perspective. There is a large movement to move away from Common Core standards, both in Montana and nationwide.
The rest of the day was focused on electronic records management in Montana. This involves both governmental and private industry. Moving from paper records to microfilm to electronic forms of record keeping is a real challenge. The possibilities for cost savings and storage savings, along with data accessibility, are endless. The challenges are also endless involving software and hardware compatibility; as always, the cost of implementation is daunting. The biggest issue is security of the systems. Some records are supposed to be public knowledge and some are private. Some information is for storage only and some is for public dissemination. There is a work group of more than 20 people working toward solutions.
I hope this update is informative during this off year in the legislative process. I am happy to discuss any of these issues with you and welcome your input. You can contact me at dansalomon12@gmail.com.
