EDUCATION SURPRISE

The surprise of the legislative session this year was the chance for additional funding for K-12 education, a happy result of a slightly smaller than anticipated shortfall and dogged work by the Legislature’s Education Committee. As both houses consider the proposed budget amendment today they should retain this higher level for education, both as aid to schools and a break for property taxpayers.

Lawmakers left Augusta last spring with a meager planned 2.3 percent increase for General Purpose Aid to Education, an amount way off the promised pace of the upcoming Essential Programs and Services funding method, due to begin no later than 2008, and providing an actual cut to program services to many schools, once other costs were taken out of the total. They pledged, however, that if there were any new money to be found, GPA would be at the top of the list.

Come January, not only wasn’t there new money, the shortfall looked huge and the governor had proposed that local districts pick up about $9 million in special-education costs for state wards. School districts throughout Maine braced for local budget battles.

Some districts will still see those battles, but many have been helped significantly by the bi-partisan agreement in the Education Committee to seek an additional $7.8 million in addition to the brightening revenue forecast. They found not only support among legislative leaders and the governor but even more direct help – a leadership compromise last weekend added another $2.2 million to GPA, for a total of $10 million, targeted partly at program costs, and representing an increase of 4.1 percent. That’s still small compared with the increases of recent years, but it is much better than where the GPA budget stood last year. The new revenue forecast also meant that Gov. King could remove the state-ward cost from the local budgets. The two improvements shift nearly $20 million away from property taxes and toward the more equitably distributed state taxes. (It would be better still if the federal government came up with its proper share on the state-ward budget line.)

The GPA proposal is not ideal. It still leaves too large a cushion ($4 million) for districts that have had plenty of time to prepare for changes in valuation and in the funding formula. Even so, some lawmakers from better-off districts continue to want the cushion to be larger. They propose taking still more money from the technology fund or from GPA itself. Protecting both of these is crucial, especially to poorer school districts, as the Education Committee understood when it strongly supported them.

The full Legislature should follow the same course. Times have been difficult with the budget shortfall, but the proposed supplemental budget presents neither panic nor profligacy. Sparing worse cuts to education was a move that will pay off for years to come.