Certainly I hope we can move things along in a thoughtful way.  However, it may fall to the minority party to start holding up the delaying tactics to the light so that Maine voters can see what is going on.

Last week, after reading both the AG’s reaction to the State Treasurer’s acts as well as Senate President Raye’s comment that he saw no need for the legislature to be involved in that issue I filed a request with the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability for a non-partisan review of the treasurer’s violation of the state constitution.

Although the governor talked about new initiatives in education during the State of the State speech, we have yet to see the details on any new initiatives.  Given the current funding issues and the changes that we have already done over the last three years our schools are struggling already.  I truly hope that the governor isn’t going to come out with any new ideas that will further jeopardize funding to our schools across the state.  There are some new issues that have surfaced regarding charter schools and potential financial issues surrounding students who are currently enrolled in private schools and home schooled.  These students are not currently included in the school funding formula that determines state funding to the communities.  It would appear that those students would not be counted in the local school district allocations from the state, but the community would have to pay the full amount to the charter school.  This could mean a very significant expense to communities, with no funding from the state.  This aspect will need to be fixed in some manner to avoid some significant costs to local tax payers that are completely unpredictable.

On another note, the preliminary estimates for school funding for the fiscal 2012-2013 school year were released today.  The new estimates take into account the changes made last year as well as changing student counts and property values.  Some districts see increases, others decreases as we see each year.  This is one of the things that creates controversy because there are always winners and losers.

Once again the governor is threatening schools!  According to the Bangor Daily News he has stated that if the legislature doesn’t enact his budget, including the Medicare cuts, DHHS will run out of funding by April 1st. and he will take the money out of the schools.  While he can’t close the schools because he doesn’t have the power to do so, he can cut their funding.  Should he do that, all of the towns will have to fund the rest of the school year because by law they need to have 175 days of school.  I suppose the Commissioner of Education could try to waive that requirement for every district, but what does that say about the importance of education?

The governor may be just trying to bully the changes though the legislature, but the latest news on that front is that there is very little likelihood of there being any waiver of current federal requirements on maintenance of effort requirements.  That would mean all of the work to try and bully this through would have been meaningless.  The fact the administration hasn’t even requested a waiver also seems to be odd timing given the importance Lepage is attaching to it.

What I find even more interesting is that the governor talked about “students first” and the importance of education, and then threatens to cut education funding.  However, he didn’t say anything about repealing the tax cut that was passed last year.  Those cuts, which benefit the wealthiest the most, haven’t gone into effect yet.  They could make up a big portion of the budget issue.  Even more horrifying, the governor in his speech talked about the fact that he will be proposing another tax cut!!!  If we have such a bad deficit, and are talking about cutting school funding, how can he even think that further tax cuts are going to find support in the legislature and in the state?

So, what should we do?  From my standpoint, we need to not cave in to this absurd budget and get to work doing what we need to do.  Convince all of the legislature that his plans are incompetent, ill advised, and a danger to the health of the state and our economy.  Then we need to repeal the tax cuts that were passed last year and redo the budget as a whole (not just DHHS).  For those of you reading this, I hope you will speak up!  Call, mail, and email your state representative (including me), your state senators and the Appropriations Committee.  The only way that the Republican majority is going to back away from supporting Lepage is if they realize that if they don’t they will end up out of office in November.  Now is the time, when everyone is looking towards the fall elections, to really put the pressure on!

If you don’t know who to write to, drop me an email at steve.lovejoy@myfairpoint.net and I will be happy to help you get in touch with them!

Don’t accept “maybe” or “we’ll see how it comes out of committee” or any other evasion.

http://bangordailynews.com/2012/01/27/health/lepage-again-threatens-to-take-money-from-schools-if-dhhs-cuts-not-approved/

The Governor also talked about the incomes in the state and the big difference between incomes in Maine in comparison to New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  He said that Maine incomes need to come up to the levels of NH and MA.  But is it our business climate that makes that difference?  A quick look at educational attainment may hold some perspective.  Maine’s population aged 25 to 64 educational attainment figures show we have 37% of that age group has at least a 2 year degree.  How does that compare to NH and MA?  New Hampshire has 46% of their population in the same group, 9% higher.  Massachusetts is even higher, with 50% hold a two year degree or better.  Education has been proven to have a major impact on wages.  If we are to catch up on wages we will have to catch up on education to get there!

The governor also focused on electricity costs and compared Maine’s rates with those of the nation and with states like Oklahoma.  If one were to look closer to home, such as  Massachusetts and New Hampshire which were used in the prior paragraph, we would have to note that both Massachusetts and New Hampshire have higher electric rates than Maine.

The governor opened up early on welfare and Mainecare.  There weren’t any surprises, he wants to cut.  He talked about the absolute need to cut, and claimed his plan would protect those truly in need, but there weren’t any firm details.  The fact of the matter is that we will need to see the details and who suffers and how much.  The language was reasonable, but we need to get the details and see where the devil is!

The final issue I want to comment on is that of upcoming initiatives that were mentioned for education.  There weren’t any particular indications of what those initiatives will be.  Certainly I expect there to be more on school choice, but we will have to see what happens.

Perhaps the most interesting thing will be to see if he talks about the loss of Kestrel to Wisconsin.  So far it has been the SODDIT (some other guy did it) routine.  The fact of the matter is that the state does not have all of the resources that a larger state such as Wisconsin has.  Plain and simple, we don’t have the ability to match larger states in these incentive packages.  The blame doesn’t lie with the Governor’s office, with Coastal Enterprises, the base redevelopment efforts, or with the legislature.  The fact of the matter is that we were probably used by Kestrel as a way to squeeze more out of Wisconsin.

Bullying has always been with us, but it has never been as widespread.  When I was in school there was bullying, and our governor has basically admitted he was a bully when he talked about stealing candy from younger kids on Halloween.  But the bullying was more limited than it is today. Now bullying can take on so many different forms.  It may be physical bullying in the school yard, but it can also become mush more due to the use of the internet and the use of email as well as social media such as Facebook.  It can also involve smart phones and the ability to tweet messages, send pictures and more.  Those avenues never used to exist, and they are so easy to use, and hide behind by using screen names.

As I have expressed to the various parties involved in this, it is not acceptable to do nothing.  Just last spring we had a young woman who attended Erskine Academy commit suicide, due in large part to the bullying she was subjected to.  While some might think there are enough rules in place, they obviously were not effective in her case, and aren’t working to protect many other children.  School will have a hard time dealing with this issue, but is an issue that isn’t going away, or easy to change.  Leadership will be required to help change school attitudes about the problem and to make bullying socially unacceptable in our schools across the state.

But we can make those changes, and you can help make it better as well.  If you have kids be sure to talk to them and if they are being bullied make sure to contact the school and talk to them about it.  If you see a kid being bullied, speak up and stop it.  That may not be easy for you, but if will make a difference!

If we can all write our own rules, we can make our numbers look better isn’t a strategy.  It’s an abandonment of educational standards and an acknowledgement that the state of South Dakota would rather save money rather than improve their educational system!

http://www.argusleader.com/article/20120117/NEWS/301170015/South-Dakota-education-plan-would-downplay-graduation-rate?odyssey=nav|head

During a work session this past week we asked a representative for DHHS, who didn’t have a lot of answers, but insisted they were right.  This is in spite of the fact that states like Texas and New Hampshire are still billing for school based services that are medically needed for special education students.  The Maine DHHS points to the fact that NH is currently being audited (as is our own DHHS).  However, preliminary indications are that the NH audit is not finding fault with the billing of the services we are telling our schools they cannot bill for.

The effect of the changes made (prior to this commissioner and governor) is that local school districts in Maine have to pay for the services themselves.  The legal requirement to provide the services is still there, but we have apparently closed the door to the funding that should be available to us.  Obviously, we need to get to the bottom of this as soon as we can so that we can potentially recoup these funds for our school districts.

The attorney’s at D&W have talked about several states and they believe that we can in fact change our rules in DHHS and be able to do the billing.  However, the department is very much against doing so.  While this may be due to the interpretation they have made, there is a rumor out there that part of the reason is that the new computer system (this is the second multimillion dollar system in the last 10 years) isn’t set up to do this billing.  If indeed we were to find out that this is part of the reason we have made the funding impossible to get, someone’s head should roll!  The fact something isn’t easy on one department in not a sufficient excuse for closing the door on $30 million dollars in funding for our schools.

The Education and Cultural Affairs committee will be holding additional work sessions on this issue, and we are trying to get an extension on the time frame for reporting this carry over bill out of committee so that we can really get to the bottom of this issue.  At this point I think the majority of the committee is convinced that there is something seriously wrong here.  Hopefully we will be able to work within the federal regulations and reinstate the schools ability to bill for these services.  Our special education students deserve the support, and it should not fall on the communities to make up for the federal funds if in fact there is a way to access the reimbursement system!

His insistance on the cuts be only from the DHHS budget will probably be overridden by bipartisan agreement.  However, it seems unlikely at this point that the tax cuts passed last year (but not yet in place) will be considered as part of the cure.  Certainly Lepage would fight againse that idea.  The entire budget is going to be tough.

The issue of education funding will probably also be contentious.  At the very end of the session last year the Bill sponsored by Senator Raye shifted funding from southern and more urban districts to those more rural areas, especially Washington County.  The bill passed partly due to the clever disguise of $19 million that would be added to the school funding formula this year.  Given the current budget situation that $19 million is very unlikely to show up.  This will mean that many districts who thought they would be OK will find they are losing significant funding.   Certainly this will create some consternation when the new figures come out.  Portland will get a bit of a break from what was projected last year because our state evaluation figures  showed a greater decline than the state as a whole so that will cusion us to an extent.