By Jenny Brundin
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kuer/local-kuer-945269.mp3
Salt Lake City, UT – It's a critical year for Utah public schools. Utah funds students on a per pupil basis at a rate considerably less than any other state in the nation. And for the past three years, there hasn't been money to pay for thousands of new students starting school. School officials say they're at the breaking point. Lawmakers see glimmers up hope in an economy that's starting to rebound. But when it comes to the state's schools, legislators have a lot more on their minds than money. KUER's Jenny Brundin reports.
Go to le.utah.gov. Then, click on search bills. Select "All Legislation." Presto! A list of all the bills proposed - so far - by lawmakers for this year's legislative session. One of the longest categories by far is education bills. There's Charter School Amendments, Charter School Modifications, Civics Education, K-3 Reading Amendments, Engineering Initiative In Elementary and Secondary Schools, Math Education Initiative. And the list goes on.
ROBERTS: I don't know of any career out there where every year they have to change what they do and adapt to new laws quite to the extent that they do in the education community.
That's Debra Roberts, chair of the state school board. This year, she and her fellow board members are asking lawmakers to pause and instead, allow teachers to implement the newly adopted national Common Core Standards. The initiative is a rigorous program to get all students ready for college. It involves immense changes in the curriculum, such as moving algebra down to second grade. But here's what Senator Howard Stephenson, chair of the public education budget committee, says about the board's request to lawmakers to put the brakes on new initiatives.
STEPHENSON: I would say that's one of the most foolish requests I've heard from the state school board. The idea that all incumbent programs are somehow better deserving than any new program is really a preposterous notion.
Stephenson is the sponsor of a more than a dozen schools bills - like . putting more real-world math curriculum into schools. He also wants to expand public charter schools, make teachers accountable, and make it easier to fire bad teachers.
STEPHENSON: My bill would remove the career status of a low-performing teacher.
Translation? No tenure. Kory Holdaway with the Utah Teacher's Association, the state's largest teacher's union, hasn't seen the bill. But he says it's a fallacy that the union wants to protect poor teachers.
HOLDAWAY: If we've got a poor teacher, it reflects poorly on the profession, so we obviously as an association wan the best and the brightest that we can get.
He prefers a more collaborative approach as practiced by the Granite school district, which works with the union to deal with bad teachers. Another bill would assign a letter grade to each school. Stephenson says it's revolutionized education in Florida, which has moved from the bottom to the top quartile in student performance in 10 years. African American and Hispanic students ranked at the bottom 10 years ago; now he says they're performing higher than white kids in Utah.
STEPHENSON: African-American and Hispanic students in Florida were ranked in the bottom nationally. They now rank near the top and in fact they are superior in performance to Utah white kids.
The school board's Debra Roberts says it wasn't just the letter grade that improved Florida's schools. Third graders who weren't at grade level weren't allowed to move on, and millions of dollars were sunk into teacher training and other programs. Because the common core standards comes with a new testing and accountability system that will take years to implement, she believes a letter grade doesn't make sense. Other proposals may get a better reception. Like letting high school students get college credit for on-line classes. Senator Howard Stephenson:
STEPHENSON: This has the capacity for saving hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that's money that lawmakers desperately need. Despite the lengthy list of bills proposing this or that change to how Utah schools operate - the main drive will be to find more DOLLARS for schools. Over the past three years, twenty-five thousand new students have started school with no new money to pay for them. Federal stimulus money helped, but schools have had to dip into reserves and into teacher's social security and retirement funds. Money is the top priority for everyone, all the way up to the Governor.
HERBERT: We're going to for the first time in three years, fund growth in education.
Here's Governor Gary Herbert.
HERBERT: We're going to add 50 million dollars into the budget to help with the growth they have here of about 14,000 plus new students that they have coming into the schools this year.
Herbert recommended 50 million more for new students, and continuing optional extended day Kindergarten for at-risk students. Preliminary studies show at risk kids who come out of full-day Kindergarten are almost at the level of their peers entering first grade. But Representative Kraig Powell, who supports full-day Kindergarten, says it will be a delicate balancing act as lawmakers put together a budget.
POWELL: It's a delicate dance that we have to perform among the various levels of the state budget and we the Governor's Office in finding that money.
Powell has his own bills that he hopes will help Utah schools. It proposes amending Utah's constitution --- to allow teachers to ask their students to bring school supplies from home. Right now state law prohibits them from charging parents for anything that resembles a fee because the constitution guarantees a free public education. Bill sponsor Representative Kraig Powell:
POWELL: This is order to solve a very simple problem in Utah right now. The teacher in my child's classroom, if she asks her student to provide school supplies, is held to be in violation of a state policy.
He says it would simply allow families who have the resources to help out. Often times teachers just dig in their own pockets to pay for supplies. But school board member Leslie Brooks Castle says that works great in an opulent neighborhood. She thinks Powell hasn't thought through implications of poor children whose parents don't have the money. She calls the legislation diversionary.
ROBERTS: We are the most underfunded education system in the United States and the legislature is asking kids to bring their own pencils to school? They need to fund education.
The school board has proposed some of its own ideas to boost funding for schools, including freezing the basic rate for local taxation. That means that as the economy improves, more money would flow into schools. Or - reviewing and eliminating some sales tax exemptions. So far though, none of those ideas appears on the long list legislative proposals.