News
Legislative Update - Provided by the South Carolina School Board's Association
Ways and Means adopts budget; charter school bill moves
The House Ways and Means Committee finalized work Thursday on its proposed $5.1 billion spending plan for 2010-2011. Under the proposal, K-12 public education will take a $104 million cut, which includes $85 million from the Education Finance Act, $9 million from the Education Improvement Act, and $10 million from federal stimulus funds. Based on the EFA cuts, next year’s proposed base student cost is anticipated to be $1,630 (reflecting a 1995 spending level). This amount does not include the addition of federal stimulus funds.
The House is expected to begin debating the budget during the week of March 15.
In other action this week, the House Education Committee by an 8-5 vote approved the controversial charter school bill (H.4243), which includes an amendment offered by Chairman Phil Owens that will allow local school district revenue to follow a student to state-sponsored brick-and-mortar and virtual charter schools. This will mean a significant impact on local district revenue. For brick-and-mortar schools, the student’s resident district must send to the state charter district a funding amount equal to the amount of local appropriations that student would have received if enrolled at his resident school. Payments to the charter district must be quarterly and failure to send them could result in the State Department of Education levying a fine equal to this payment against the resident district.
Virtual charter schools were initially excluded from additional funds. However, under the bill virtual charter schools would receive up to $5,000 per student (state and local funding). Briefly, under the proposal, local funding that the student would have received in his resident public school is to supplement the percentage of the base student cost as funded by the legislature, multiplied by appropriate weightings, up to a total amount of $5,000.
The charter school bill could come up for debate in the House as soon as Wednesday, March 3.
