Education Budget on Everyone’s Mind
The State of Alabama has two budgets, the General Fund, and the Education Trust Fund. Basically the General Fund covers everything in the state budget that is non-education related, while the Education Trust Fund covers all education budget items from K through college. The General Fund has passed both the House and Senate and is awaiting for the Governor’s signature. Baring some major surprise I would imagine the Governor will sign the budget and it will be done for the year. The Education Budget is another story. There is a battle brewing between higher education and K-12 schools. When budget cuts were made in this year due to a slowdown in revenue growth, higher education took a much harder hit than K-12. While K-12 roughly ended at about level funding from last year’s budget higher education will take about a 9-10% budget cut. I am not on the budget committee so I cannot speak to some of the more intricate details of the budget but from what I understand it was about the best that could have been done with little new revenue to work with. The budget passed the House after a long debate and has been in the Senate for about a week now. Higher Education is asking that $25 million be added to the bottom line of the Education Budget to help soften the blow they are going to take next year. Adding to the bottom line of a budget is risky sometimes because usually you just take money from somewhere else and add it to say higher education. By adding to the bottom line you are basically saying that the budget will actually grow more than the legislative fiscal office or Governor’s executive budget office have projected. If you add $25 million to the bottom line and the state falls short of the revenue projected the entire Education Budget goes in to proration and everyone is cut equally. This has both sides of the education debate dug in pretty firm. With only one day to go in the session the Education Budget will have to pass the Senate, come back to the House for our concurrence (since it has to pass both chambers in the same form) and then go to the Governor for his signature or veto. All of this has to happen in one day. If it does not happen on Monday a special session will be required automatically because we must pass an Education Budget before October 1st. The question on everyone’s mind is how hard is higher education going to dig in on this issue in stopping the budget from passing and is there any room for negotiations to end the impasse between higher education and K-12. We won’t know until Monday but this issue is looming large for everyone.
