It fails to address the needs of disadvantaged children. It punishes teachers. It is a budget that will sow the seeds of discontent among all who are committed to providing every child with an education of quality and equality. I believe this action to be unconstitutional. Unconstitutional or not, it is quite simply wrongheaded to separate academic testing from the state agency that has as its mission to promote learning.
Testing is an integral part of that mission.
While this budget includes modest increases in expenditures for special education and bilingual-bicultural programs, they are insufficient to even maintain the state's current level of support for these programs. Specifically, over the biennium the special education reimbursement rate will decline from 35.7 percent to 33.2 percent and the bilingual education reimbursement rate will fall from 18.2 percent to 17.1 percent. Clearly, school districts are being squeezed from every side. Despite increasingly vocal opposition to the revenue caps, this budget provides no relief for school districts that are already postponing building maintenance, increasing class sizes, and cutting curricular and extracurricular programs. The 1 percent flexibility we have sought in three successive biennial budget requests was again rejected, but to add insult to injury, the governor froze the current inflationary increase in the revenue caps.