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Gov's ed budget meets bipartisan disapproval

By Lynn Hatter

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wfsu/local-wfsu-951244.mp3

Tallahassee, FL – Florida Governor Rick Scott has unveiled his first education budget, which includes more than three-billion dollars in cuts to K through 12 schools. As Lynn Hatter reports, the budget was met with bi-partisan disapproval from a key education committee in the House.

Scott gets a 3.3 billion dollar reduction by not replacing 1.5 billion in stimulus money and cutting more than 700 dollars per student, totaling another 1.6 billion dollars. While lawmakers knew the stimulus money would dry up this year, the cuts to per student spending took the House PreK-12 Committee by surprise. Chairwoman Marti Coley has said she wants to preserve per-student spending, which is currently at 69-hundred dollars.

"So we knew reductions were coming, 10-percent is really steep. So we will consider his proposals, and we will make our own proposals as well. And I think our committee members have shown that they are looking at this very carefully and we're trying to find any area that we can reduce that won't directly affect the students."

The governor's office placed the per-student decrease lower at 300 dollars. In explaining its point of view, Scott Kittel with the governor's budget office said part of the cut would be absorbed when school employees start paying five percent of their income into the state retirement system. That led to this exchange with Republican Representative Kelli Stargel.

"School district employees will be paying in to the FRS, so while we're cutting the budget to the tune of 518-million to acknowledge the state is returning those dollars to the General Revenue fund it does not pick up employees will be paying a similar amount to the FRS but that's still an ultimate decrease to the formula. I mean even though they're paying it in, when we look at the overall number it's still a decrease."

Critics say the pension swap is a decrease because public school classrooms have never seen that money, and won't if the legislature doesn't put the savings into the education budget. Florida School Board Association head Dr. Wayne Blanton took it a step further, calling the retirement swap, "smoke and mirrors."

"You can't do that because the dollars aren't there. And that's some of the line of questioning today is, how does that get done? So I think that's going to be a real sticking point this whole legislative session."

In addition to cutting stimulus and per-student funding, Scott also proposed reductions in education earmarks for programs like Girl Scouts and the Science Fair, but he boosted dollars for testing.