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Thursday, July 26, 2007
Playing Politics With School Funding, Again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Although the legislative session ended months ago, Georgia’s esteemed governor and her lawmakers are in a virtual tug-of-war over who gets to determine how your tax money is being spent.
Remember the dispute over the elementary foreign language classes? Gov. Sonny Perdue wanted to eliminate the small program, which allowed slightly more than two dozen campuses to offer foreign language classes to students who normally wouldn’t get such instruction until middle or high school.
Before the session ended, the Legislature agreed to allocate close to $1.6 million to let the program continue — much to the delight of parents in metro Atlanta whose children had benefited from the course work. But, instead of signing the budget and letting the wishes of state senators and representatives stand, Perdue made changes to allocations he didn’t agree with — changes, mind you, that weren’t in keeping with the budget the Legislature passed.
Guess what happened to the foreign language money? According to James Salzer’s story today, Perdue told state Department of Education officials to use the $1.6 million to instead give elementary schools throughout the state $1,200 each for foreign language materials.
That caused some of the 29 campuses in the elementary foreign language program to drop their classes for the coming school year.
Now, I’m afraid I know the answer to this question. But I just gotta ask: Is anyone out there bothered that the governor’s fretting over how a miniscule fraction of the state’s $20.2 billion budget was spent, when, after nearly three years, his Education Finance Task Force has yet to come up with a plan for how to fund Georgia’s financially strapped public schools?
