Gov. Tina Kotek testified Monday, Jan. 27, before the House Education Committee about House Bill 2140, which would codify some education advocate-supported methods for calculating the current service level for the State School Fund. (Photo by Jake Arnold, OSBA)
The governor’s recommended budget featured an $11.36 billion State School Fund, a better starting point than we have come to expect in recent years.
That’s thanks in large part due to significant work over the past year. Gov. Tina Kotek’s staff, state budget writers and education advocates collaborated to update methodologies used in the current service level calculation to better reflect the realities of district budgets.
The State School Fund process starts with determining first how much money schools would need just to keep doing what they are already doing as everything gets more expensive, known as the current service level.
Every two years there has been a big fight because legislative budget analysts used estimates that fell far below what school business officials reported were the actual costs they were seeing.
Not this year because the governor’s office agreed to some of the school business officials’ methods for calculating CSL.
House Bill 2140 would codify some of those agreed-upon updates in statute to ensure they are used for each budget moving forward, regardless of who might be in the governor’s seat. The two key elements in the bill are:
- Allocating the State School Fund to districts 49% in the first year of the biennium and 51% in the second year, and basing the CSL on the second year’s funding level.
- Accounting for local revenue on an annual basis, not just once during the biennium.
These changes equate to hundreds of millions of dollars being factored into the “roll-up” cost that were previously not captured.
HB 2140 had a public hearing in the House Education Committee on Monday, Jan. 27, and is scheduled for a possible committee vote on Monday, Feb. 3. It is among the first bills to move through the committee this session, and we support it.
This agreement has us starting the session in a different place than previous years. We are no longer proposing an alternative funding level for the State School Fund. Budget writers and advocates alike agree that $11.36 billion represents a realistic CSL. This allows us to instead focus our advocacy on the investments necessary to move the dial for students.
Put another way: CSL is the funding floor; not disagreeing about that number allows us to start focusing on improvements to the rest of the house.
– Stacy Michaelson
OSBA director of government relations and communications
