Senate Passes Education Finance Bill.
Late Night/Early Morning Proceedings. It was the wee, small hours of Tuesday morning when the Senate passed their version of the omnibus education finance bill on a 34-30 party-line vote. Unlike the six-plus hour debate on the House floor, the Senate took between two and three hours to field eleven amendments (rejecting more than half–all offered by the Republicans), but accepting the rest, several which were offered by Republicans, including an amendment offered by Senator Carla Nelson that ensures student academic freedom and one offered by Senator Julia Coleman that protects school staff if they comment on or participate in an investigation related to school safety. One of the amendments offered by Senator Jason Rarick would have created a legislative study group to examine disparities in school funding and develop recommendations to lessen these disparities. As someone who has dedicated a large portion of his professional life studying funding and tax base disparities, I am of two minds regarding the amendment (which did fail on a party-line vote). There does need to be a greater appreciation of funding disparities, which have been growiing. At the same time, it is obvious that there are funding disparities and everyone who has followed the issue has a pretty clear set of ideas as to why there are disparities and why the continue to grow. I remember remarking while serving on a panel at the MASA convention a couple of years back that issues relating to school funding both in terms of overall adequacy and funding equity have been studied to death and that action needs to be taken. As well-intentioned as Senator Rarick’s amendment is, the time for talking is well past and whoever is control of the Legislature needs to tackle this issue. It’s simply gone on long enough.
The conferees for the omnibus education finance bill are as follows:
House:
Representative Mary Frances Clardy
Representative Heather Edelson
Representative Samantha Sencer-Mura
Senate
Interesting to note that although the House vote on final passage was along party lines, the House conferees include Representative Ron Kresha, the minority caucus lead on the House Education Finance Committee. The Senate did not include any Republicans on the conference committee. The tradition has generally followed the rule that “if you don’t for the bill, you can’t be on the conference committee.” That maxim isn’t etched in stone and the last slot on the conference committee really doesn’t mean that much because only three votes are needed on each side of the table to pass or defeat a provision.
The other observation worth noting is that the House and Senate chief authors of the READ Act, Representative Edelson and Senator Maye Quade are both on the conference committee. There are some items yet to be worked out in terms of amount and purposes for which the funding can be used.
The Senate conferees were named today (Thursday) and it is unlikely that there will be a conference committee meeting before early next week. The bills have a lot of the same language and where diferences exist, they should be relatively easy to bridge and requiring only several meetings. Given the partisan rancor surrounding the Senator Nicole Mitchell situation, next week will certainly be tense.
The education policy conference committee is very close to closing up its work, but has yet to approve the report. I expect the two education-related bills to be on the resepctive legislative floors within similar time frames and perhaps on the same day. The Legislature will have to finish its work by next Sunday because they are required to adjourn on Monday, May 20, and they cannot pass legislation on the last day of the biennium.
I will keep you in the loop.