Political Action

Push for Promised Funding

Your help is urgently needed to press lawmakers right away to protect school districts’ revenue limits while securing $402 million in promised funding for the Quality Education Investment Act. CTA is pushing for new legislation that will protect QEIA and prevent funds from being redirected from schools’ Revenue Limits – districts’ basic perstudent funding – until the state Superintendent of Public Instruction certifies that other state or federal funds will be used to replace the Revenue Limit funds.

The QEIA funding was guaranteed as part of the July 2009-2010 state budget agreement. The “QEIA Fix” bill — SB 84 — provides a process to allow districts to certify their local budgets and fully implement QEIA. The ambiguity of the original legislation has made some districts increasingly nervous.

Background: Court Ruling Won Funds

Under a court settlement brought by CTA in 2006, the administration agreed to provide the Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA) with $406 million annually in non-Proposition 98 funding.

CTA filed the lawsuit when the Schwarzenegger administration refused to repay moneys owed to public education as a result of the suspension of Proposition 98 in 2004-2005.

As part of the 2009 budget agreement, the funding for QEIA was to be provided from other state and federal sources, not at the expense of basic school funding.

As a result, CTA is urging lawmakers to approve SB 84.

The bill would guarantee that no Revenue Limit funding would be diverted from school districts until replacement state or federal funds have been identified and certified.

Now lawmakers need to send the governor SB 84.  The bill will repair the financial transaction, protect local school districts, and get  the desperately needed funding out to schools.

CTA Coordinators: Contact Lawmakers

Contact your state Senator and Assembly Member now.  Use the talking points below.

Urge other CTA members at your school to contact their state Senators and Assembly members.

Please make your calls starting immediately and continue making them through Friday. The Senate and the Assembly are expected to vote on the measure by Friday.

The message to lawmakers is short and simple:

• Pass SB 84 now.

• Protect basic funding for all districts while ensuring that QEIA schools also get their own desperately needed funding.

• SB 84 will ensure that other state and federal funding is directed to the QEIA and those schools of greatest need.

For more information, contact CTA Legislative Advocate Estelle Lemieux or GR Communications Consultant Len Feldman at 916.325.1500.

Latest proposal cuts funding for schools, in-home care

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to further cut school funding by $680 million and eliminate in-home care services for the majority of current recipients, his Department of Finance announced today.

The cuts come in addition to a new 5 percent salary cut for state workers Schwarzenegger wants lawmakers to impose. Department of Finance Director Michael Genest offered the latest round of $2.8 billion in budget solutions in response to declining revenue and economic projections.

The governor’s proposal would eliminate adult day care for low-income Californians at risk of being placed in nursing homes. His $680 million cut to K-14 schools would come on top of an already-proposed $5.4 billion reduction, for a total of $6.1 billion through June 2010. Schwarzenegger also would take from education $315 million in transit funds that pay for school buses that serve students.

California faces a $24.3 billion budget deficit after approving a $92 billion spending plan in February that assumed a stronger economic picture.

Schwarzenegger said he does not believe the state should again increase taxes after he and lawmakers did so by $12 billion in the February budget. Generally, program cuts target education and low-income residents, which Genest said is necessary because that’s where the bulk of state resources go. Schwarzenegger earlier this week proposed wholesale elimination of the state’s welfare-to-work program and Healthy Families, the state’s low-cost government health care for children of the working poor.

“If you look at what the government does, the government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Genest said. “We don’t provide very many services even to the middle class. … That’s the answer to the question in general. You have to cut where the money is.

“CalWORKs, Healthy Families — those are all very targeted at low-income groups. And when we have no money, when we have to stop spending everything we can stop spending, obviously those are the places.”