Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Waiting for a Funding Formula

Hard Deadlines:

The Senate finance committee, during hearings on education funding formulas yesterday, replaced the Gallo bill (S2770) with the RIDE/Costantino bill from the House (H8094), according to a posting on RI is Ready's Facebook page. According to the post, the one change so far is pushing the implementation date to 2013.

I've avoided going into the weeds about the particulars of the proposed funding formulae for education funding in Rhode Island. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on all the aspects of the problem.

I am, at this point, in favor of resolving the funding for next year as quickly as possible, even if it means pushing back the implementation of whatever long-term solution they come up with, because for a couple months now my wife has been stuck at various stages in the hiring process of several local charter schools who variously don't know how much money they'll have, whether they'll be able to expand, or whether they will open in 2010.

The impact of changes in charter funding are particularly difficult to predict because of the small size of the schools and the fact that several different facets of funding will probably all change at the same time (i.e., you get more per student, but now you have to pay all transportation costs). One also gets the impression that the lobbying by the "mayoral academies" and "traditional" charters might be working at cross-purposes, too.

1 comment:

Madame Defarge said...

Dear, it's been four months now. That's two more than a couple.