Find us on Facebook
Follow us on TwitterWill the State Pick Up Tab For Mandates?
Published: October 27, 2009
While officials in virtually every state agency are scrambling for every dollar they can find, the Virginia Board of Education is proposing that localities hire additional staff for their school divisions.
Such a move would require additional money to pay the staff, but the education board didn’t say who would put up the money. With all the talk in the past about state mandates on the localities, the assumption is the state would increase its share of aid to public education in the localities to cover those added costs.
But that assumption hasn’t always been accurate. The localities have learned from the past that the state is good at coming up with proposals that would improve education or other state programs — but at their expense.
Could that be part of the latest effort on the state’s part to beef up Virginia’s Standards of Quality, the state-mandated goals for public education?
New Feature
Sign up for our newsletter e-mailed to you at 8 a.m. each day Monday through Friday.
The Board of Education wants the state to set staffing levels for full-time teachers of special, gifted, and career and technical education. Under proposed changes to the Standards of Quality, each school division would be required to hire additional staff based on students’ disabilities, for example. For gifted students, the new standard would be one teacher per 1,000 students, which doesn’t sound like much of an increase to a program that often has been shortchanged in the public schools.
Current staffing standards for those positions, as The Associated Press reported last week following the board’s meeting in Richmond, have been defined by agency regulations and budget language. If approved, the new proposals would become part of state law.
The proposals are part of the board’s proposed Standards of Quality revisions, which will be forwarded to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and the next General Assembly. The legislature, ultimately, will decide whether to approve them and their cost.
The proposals for additional staffing in these important areas of education are undoubtedly sound. But who will pay the additional costs? The state has a long record of passing along mandates to the localities without the money to pay for them.
Lean budget times, such as the one the state — and the localities — are facing don’t mean that needs will go away. But before filling those needs, the state should assure the localities it will pay its share of the additional costs.
The governor and the Assembly will have their hands full balancing the budget to meet current needs when the legislature meets again in January. Any additional needs must come with the assurance that the state will pay its share or more. And to accomplish that, the lawmakers must find new sources of revenue. In 2010, that will be a challenge.
Advertisement
Reader Reactions
Are you the voice of the new majority?
I’ll bet that you and/or your family are net receivers of governmental expenditures, getting & taking more than you pay.
With every Citizen Survey done by the City in the past few years, the majority have said that the City’s taxes are too high. And believe me, there are city & school employees that responded to that survey saying that we need more.
I have no burrs, don’t own a saddle, don’t use downtown parking and am intellegent enough to know the city needs to both use and provide utilities. And if you look at that end of the City’s budget, you will see performance standards and zero based budgeting. I doubt that if you added up all the other 54 suggested places to cut the City’s budget you would get to the $15.3 million non-mandated school operational expenditures.
So I can count on you telling us where the “Voluntary” $15.3 million goes?
AF, apparently our city leaders are relatively satisfied with the current arrangement and see it as appropriate as do most citizens other than you. Not to say that a whistle blower is not helpful…and you’ve been at this for a long time, like a dog on a bone.
Other than politics, just what is the burr under your saddle? Why do you not assess other portions of the city funding like utilities or parking or anything else? You seem to have an ax to grind and that makes me suspicious when you write.
“The state has a long record of passing along mandates to the localities without the money to pay for them.“
Perhaps the writer could provide specifics of these so-called unfunded state mandates for public education.
The Virginia Constitution requires that the costs of providing this governmental service is a shared local/state responsibility and I can assure you that the state funds “its’ share” of the mandated costs as do the local taxpayers. Contact the VDOE and they will be glad to explain this to you.
The issue then becomes the additional funding provided by the local taxpayers for non-mandated programs and staffing levels.
In the case of LCS, taxpayers are mandated to provide $15.8 million operational monies, yet our City Council feels the necessity to extract that plus AN ADDITIONAL $15.3 MILLION. And while we are mandated to have about 700 instructional personnel, our leaders feel the necessity to employ nearly 300 more than that.
To question those in charge what, exactly, does that “extra” $15.3 million buy us we are always told about the “special needs children” that cost us extra…yet all of those costs are mandated and are included in our mandated expenditures.
So while our leaders are holding budget informational workshops with a 55 line item worksheet for items to reduce, the only line that is not specific is the “non-mandated” extra funding for LCS.
When one asks the question of why the need for the extra $15.3 million, the stock replies are “more is always better” or “our children are our future” or “don’t you care about about the children?“
Isn’t it time for the city leaders to to demand from the LCS a zero-based budget, or at least at least a mandated funding level budget, and then show us what the extra funding provides?
And by the way, this “extra $15.3 million” requires an “extra VOLUNTARY REAL ESTATE TAX RATE OF $0.32/$100” and is the major reason the city’s rate is so much higher than our neighbors.
Post a Comment(Requires free registration)
- Please avoid offensive, vulgar, or hateful language.
- Respect others.
- Use the "Flag Comment" link when necessary.
- See the Terms and Conditions for details.
Advertisement