The first of the five bills that will implement the state budget for the coming two years was approved by the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday.
SB458 is the K-12 education bill that includes total support of $10,204 per student in 2022 and $10,290 per student in 2023.
For fiscal years 2022 and 2023, that comes to $2.62 billion in General Fund dollars.
When other state funding is added in, the state's share rises to more than $4 billion over the biennium.
In addition, the bill includes just over $3 billion in funding in each fiscal year not appropriated from the General Fund but authorized for schools to spend in fiscal 2022. Those dollars include the so-called local school revenues, primarily the Local School Support Tax portion of the sales tax and the property taxes dedicated to school districts. The local revenues make up more than half of total K-12 funding.
The legislation funds the Pupil Centered Funding Plan that replaces the Nevada Plan that has apportioned public school funding in the state for the past 50 years. The new plan includes weighted increases in per pupil funding for specific categories of students including at-risk students, English language learners and gifted and talented students.
There was significant discussion about a small number of charter schools that, under the new Pupil Centered Funding Plan, would lose per pupil money.
Sen. Heidi Seevers Gansert said the goal of the new funding plan was that no schools would get less per pupil than they have received under the Nevada Plan. She said while a small amount of total funding is involved, the cuts would be severe for those small schools.
Senate Finance Chairman Chris Brooks, D-Las Vegas, agreed with Gansert that issue needs to be addressed. He said a separate piece of legislation would be crafted to put the roughly $1.4 million a year into those nine small charters to make them whole.
The K-12 education funding bill will be followed quickly by the Appropriations Act that spells out how other General Fund dollars must be spent, the Authorizations Act that deals with federal and all other non-state funding, the Capital Improvements bill and the Pay bill that spells out state worker funding for both classified and unclassified employees.
All five measures must be introduced and allowed to sit for at least 24 hours before final action on them. Together, they total more than $26 billion over the coming two-year budget cycle.
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