A Legislative interim task force has put four bills in the hopper to support special education. These four bills are intended to strengthen the special education extraordinary cost fund, additional funding for which school districts can apply if their regular special ed allocation runs out. But each of these bills expands government, so expect Governor-Elect Kristi Noem to veto them.
House Bill 1001 requires the Department of Education to recalculate how much the state should spend to educate students with any of six levels of disability every two years instead of every three. The Department is supposed to recalculate those allocations this year; HB 1001 would have them do it again next year, thus increasing the work that state government does.
Senate Bill 1 takes the remarkable step of repealing administrative rules (I don’t immediately recall seeing a bill reach across the statutory line into the rules that are generally created by departments and boards) to make the Extraordinary Cost Oversight Board a creature of statute. It takes one seat on the seven-member board away from school districts and gives that seat to a legislator, thus representing Speaker-in-Waiting Steve Haugaard’s (R-10/Sioux Falls) drive to expand the power of the Legislature.
SB 1 also rejiggers the membership requirements for school district reps. Currently, the six seats allocated to school district reps must include at least one representative from school districts in each of three size groups based on average daily membership: fewer than 360 students, 360 to 2,000, and more than 2,000 students. That scheme divides the schools into groups that look like the SDHSAA AA/A/B classifications. SB 1 requires that at least one of the five school district seats go to school districts in each of three categories based on fall enrollment: 200 or fewer students, more than 200 but fewer than 600, and 600 or more. SB 1 thus aligns representation with the K-12 funding categories, a seemingly reasonable step.
Check out how that affects representation:
Current brackets based on ADM:
| # students (ADM FY 2018) | % students | # schools |
| 18,791 | 14.15% | 83 |
| 35,859 | 27.01% | 51 |
| 78,113 | 58.84% | 15 |
SB 1 brackets:
| # students (FE 2017) | % students | # schools |
| 4,571 | 3.44% | 31 |
| 25,945 | 19.54% | 78 |
| 102,246 | 77.01% | 40 |
One could argue that the current representation scheme is more democratic, guaranteeing more voices from the schools with more students, while the SB 1 scheme guarantees more voices from smaller schools operating under different funding calculations. DoE keeps a democratic balance right now, with members from Brookings, Watertown, Pierre, Lyman County, Howard, and Smee. SB 1 takes one of those seats away, gives two seats to schools representing less than a quarter of all students, guarantees the 40 biggest schools just one seat at the table. I invite discussion of which seems the smarter scheme… though I’m pretty sure whatever brackets we choose, we’re better off giving more seats to school districts and none to legislators, who do more than enough to starve our schools during Session.
Senate Bill 2 raises the base allocation to the Extraordinary Cost fund next school year from four million dollars to five million dollars and raises that allocation by the index factor (3% or inflation, whichever is less) annually. The Legislature ignores that index factor at will in funding K-12 education, so applying the index factor to the Extraordinary Cost fund is mostly meaningless until we elect legislators who respect the law and education.
Senate Bill 3 creates a twelve-member task force to talk about special education through 2020. This board, like the cost oversight board, does not guarantee representation to any parents of students with disabilities. But, parents or no, since Jim Bolin and his friends elected bloat-fighting Kristi Noem instead of Billie Sutton, this government bloat is surely headed straight for a veto.
HB 1001: Is there some reason why the state can’t keep up with the times? Students and teachers are in school every day, yet the state thinks it can take a couple years vacation in providing money to educate students. Really? Why can’t they can’t recalculate this every year?
SB 1: This just puts politicians more in charge, taking away any flexibility. Legislators like to think this is “strengthening the Legislature,” but generally it means weakening the voice of the public. Smaller districts do have less budgetary flexibility, but I would be willing to bet that larger districts have more students to educate. It’s a tough one to figure out who needs more representation, but it’s NOT the Legislature.
SB2: What sort of stupidity provides for an index factor less than inflation? I do prefer index factors to thinking that the stupid Legislators have enough short-term memory capacity to remember what they promise from year to year.
SB 3: Ah, ha. See SB 1. No parents, fewer educators. Who needs these experts when you can dumb down the board with Legislators.
Hey, Cory!
What experience do you have in the Education sector to make your opinion more valid?
Also, since you are running for representation, what makes you qualified to make decisions that affect a multi-billion dollar enterprise? What have you done outside of blogging politics that would make you qualified?
[Evan, if that’s going to become your schtick, ignoring the topic and turning the discussion to me personally, you’re on the wrong blog. Discussing the bills coming before the Legislature is of far greater public interest than discussing the personal qualities of anyone in this comment section.]
Donald, you ask a really good question. Why would HB 1001 stop at two years? Why not recalculate the cost of serving special kids every year? Call the schools, get the data, compile a table, and provide the Legislature with the most up-to-date info possible to support budgetary decisions?
Cory, Thank you!
Getting reports from every school every year about actual costs could really improve the current lazy index-factor adjustment. Go to the special ed directors and get price lists for essential software, textbooks, classroom equipment, and other resources necessary to provide services for students with various disabilities. Get some real counts of staff time spent to provide those services. Compare school to school: maybe there are some schools finding better software at better prices or finding ways to provide the same level of service with less overhead. Instead of just pulling a number out of thin air (CPI or 3%, whichever is lower, an arbitrary choice divorced from the actual and specific costs of providing educational services), we could do some serious evidence-based budgeting…
…and we can collect that evidence all the more effectively with more educators on the oversight board, more people involved directly in education, and fewer legislators. Let the Department of Education and the school districts compile the data and make recommendations; let the legislators make the higher-level budget decisions based on that informed input.