GOP budget reveals: The evidence is in: no reason to trust our Tea-Publican
legislature and governor to support public education.
Howard Fischer reports the GOP budget reveals that Governor
Ducey’s oft-repeated assertion that Prop. 123 is a “first step” to more
education funding is a scam. His budget actually cut education funding, again. Ducey, lawmakers looking to restore
education cuts:
A tentative agreement being negotiated would reverse a year-old
decision by lawmakers to change how the state calculates aid to schools. The
result would be to restore money that schools would have lost in the agreement
announced earlier this week.
The deal being worked on also would scrap a proposed change in
law that would penalize districts which use their own taxpayer dollars to
construct needed new schools.
Pressure has been building amid increased scrutiny of the fact that the budget proposal — the one that is supposed to
represent the consensus of Ducey and the GOP leaders — actually would
cut the amount of money going to K-12 schools this coming year.
It also comes as Ducey is trying to convince voters to approve
Proposition 123 to tap the state education trust fund to settle a lawsuit and
provide more money for schools over the next decade.
More to the point, the governor, in a bid to
line up votes for Prop 123, is promising that the infusion from the ballot
measure is just a “first step” in improving education funding. The fact that
the budget deal announced earlier would actually cut education funding makes
that a harder sell.
Some would call this a Bait and Switch while others would simply call it
fraud. It is a scam nonetheless.
On paper, that announced budget plan includes $132 million new
funding for K-12 schools. That, however, simply reflects
both the growth in the number of students as well as the voter-mandated
requirement — one the state is finally obeying — to boost aid
every year to account for inflation.
But that plan also would change how the state computes how much
each school district gets, using each school’s current enrollment versus the
number of students it had last year. That change harms more
districts than it helps.
The bottom line is that K-12 funding next year
under the deal Ducey agreed to would have been $21 million less than
what the schools would otherwise get automatically just from
enrollment and inflation.
The revelation of this scam was too much for The Republic‘s Laurie Roberts. More Cuts to K-12 schools? Really,
Gov. Ducey? Really? Source
Wake up, Arizona.
