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Legislature Likely to Spend Summer Studying School Safety, Mental Health, Special Ed

Tomorrow isn’t just Veto Day in Pierre; at least four committees will meet:

The Executive Board looks particularly interesting. After picking new computers (don’t do it! Wait two years for the foldable iPhone!), the Executive Board will set the summer study agenda. Last year we got three summer studies (in addition to the nonmeandered waters Special Session): campaign finance, initiative and referendum, and workforce housing. Here are the top three vote-getters from among fifteen surveyed topics with information drawn from the official summer study descriptions:

  1. Mental Health and Safety in K-12: Senate Health and Human Services wants to tackle “increasing violence in our schools” (actually, false, says a new study showing school shootings are decreasing) by studying, among other things, “issues of adverse childhood experiences (ACES), bullying and suicide ideation; Status
    of adverse behavior issues that lead to discipline; Management of discipline behavior issues; Access to counselors and mental
    health professionals, along with meaningful interventions; Safety policies that restrict open access to schools; Response policies
    to violence in our schools.”
  2. Access to Mental Health Services: Senate State Affairs wants to review the practices, availability, and public costs of mental health services in South Dakota.
  3. Extraordinary Cost Fund for Special Education: Rep. Tim Johns (R-30/Lead) wants to study “the increasing need for special education and related services” (true, at least from my firsthand classroom experience, in which I’m seeing more students on IEPs and more students accompanied by paraprofessionals in the regular classroom) and discuss whether current state funding is adequate.

Numbers 1 and 2 above intersect, but not perfectly. Rep. Karen Soli (D-15/Sioux Falls) suggests the two could be combined, but she recognizes that student issues could be lost in the shuffle of a broader study of mental health services. Senator Reynold Nesiba (D-15/Sioux Falls) asks how much of the mental health services ground has already been plowed by the Mental Health Oversight Committee created by last year’s House Bill 1183 to monitor and report how well the criminal justice system addresses mental illness. Rep. Kevin Jensen (R-16/Canton) freaks out over the K-12 mental health and safety study: ” This is a take over of Education by DSS and there will be no local control of discipline left for the schools. This is government overreach at its worst.”

Yeah, sure, Kevin.

2018 Interim Study Rankings, LRC, posted for 2018.03.26 meeting.
2018 Interim Study Rankings, LRC, posted for 2018.03.26 meeting.

If the Executive Board decides to combine or drop any of those top three vote getters, the next two most popular study proposals deal with budget and branding:

  1. Budget Realignment: That’s Rep. John Mills’s (R-4/Volga) code for “Let’s cut the budget again!” He wants to study Governor Daugaard’s 2011 budget hackery, ask departments what they’d do if they faced a similar X% cut now, and thus “establish legislative priorities that could be useful with coordinating or directing the priorities of a new
    administration.”
  2. Brand Board Review: House Agriculture and Natural Resources wants to review “the authority, structure, and operations of the Brand Board… the related laws and administrative rules… the brand registration process… [and] the costs associated with the brand book publication and investigations of livestock theft and fraud.”

Senator Deb Soholt (R-14/Sioux Falls) notes that the Department of Agriculture “does not feel the Brand Board needs a full summer study.” Rep. Steve Livermont (R-27/Martin) looks up from Breitbart and hollers this affirmation of Rep. Mills’s budget study:

The growth of government is out of control. We need to shrink the size of government and leave more of the taxpayers’ money in their hands. Instead of looking for new revenue, a close analysis of the need and scope of government agencies should be made to provide basic services. There has to be a point where services are good enough or not needed and the public has to assume responsibility of their own actions [Rep. Steve Livermont, “2018 Study Survey Comments,” Executive Board documents, posted for 2018.03.26 meeting].

Translation: Why should the state plow all four lanes of I-90? Two lanes are good enough; y’all can shovel the rest yourselves!

The top three topics would make for a good interim focused on education and mental health issues that affect every community. The budget realignment proposal seems redundant with the diligent work of the Appropriations Committee; besides, it’s just spitballing that will become entirely irrelevant the moment the Legislature gets its revenue projections next winter. As for the Brand Board, I’m inclined to believe Senator Soholt and the Department of Agriculture and say the topic is narrow enough to be addressed without a whole interim committee (but then I’d have thought that about nonmeandered waters as well). All that I can see as a major need for the Brand Board is to update its website—it hasn’t posted a Missing & Stolen Report since December! How are we supposed to keep an eye out for rustlers if we don’t have current data?!

Stay tuned after adjournment tomorrow for the Executive Board’s discussion and decision on how some lucky legislators will spend their summer!

5 Comments

  1. Donald Pay

    I’ve always been struck by how reactionary these interim studies are. Legislators are never leaders. They never look 5, 10, 20 year out to consider how the state can progress. They are reacting to the latest issue in the news. They never set real goals, certainly none that last more than a year. The task force on teacher pay was one area I thought they might actually be able to set a goal and work toward achieving it. No, oh no, we can’t have that around here. Legislators look at the news, mostly, and try to figure out how to put a bandage over some seeping wound.

    I love the wind energy topic, but, really, that should have been at the top of the list 15-25 years ago. Dakota Rural Action was bringing lots of good ideas about that in the 1990s, and a real visionary in Steve Wegman was on staff at the PUC. I still think South Dakota would benefit by figuring out wind energy, but they would rather go back to generating Superfund sites from mining gold and uranium.

    Mental health in the community and in schools is important, but unless you are ready to institute an income tax, forget about making real improvements. These studies could be combined, and they could talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

    I don’t know how many times budgeting have been discussed in interim committees. I think about every ten years, at least. Some guy gets peeved about some little budget issue and goes on the warpath. In order to broaden out the war, they decide to couch their pet peeve into a general budgetary discussion. The Legislatures like to recycle topics, apparently, but they never do anything on them.

    How many reviews of the brand board to you need? It’s a waste. Not just the interim committee, but the brand board. Abolish the damn board, and let people fight it out with guns.

    If SD is really interested in future mining, and I have no clue why they would be, they ought to be getting their laws in order. What they have now was developed in the 1990s and obviously failed. I’ll be willing to lay a bet they repealed some of the good stuff they had while people weren’t focused on it.

  2. grudznick

    Mr. H says “Appropriations meets in Room 362 right after the Legislature adjourns in Room 362.”

    Either it will be very crowded in that room or grudznick must issue a style and form blog correction.

  3. grudznick

    Mr. Pay is righter than right that the Brand Board should be abolished and that the legislatures just rehash the same shallow topics time after time. This is partially a result of term limits the depth of the thinking capacity of many who are elected.

  4. That’s a really good point, Donald. All reaction, no proaction—that’s our Legislature. We wait for problems not just to arise but to become intolerable, then take action that just gets us by. Is that uniquely South Dakota? Does any state legislature do better at the vision thing?

  5. mike from iowa

    Fence fixing. Never time to do it right. Always time to do it over.

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