Writing January 11 in the Silicon Valley Education Foundation's thoughts on Public Education's "Educated Guess," John Fensterwald says, "...what [Brown] is proposing in the event voters reject his tax increase in November is unprecendented in terms of impact on K-12 schoools and community colleges -- and brazenness."
In the proposed '12-'13 Brown budget, the threat if the requested sales and income tax increases fail is a cut in K-14 education by $4.9 billion. Half of that, Fensterwald explains, would "reflect the drop in Prop 98 obligation...but the other $2.4 billion would come from sadding Prop 98 with the responsibility for repaying general obligation education bonds -- a burden that until now was handled through the General Fund. The effect would be to cut school funding by $2.4 billion without going through the formal process of suspending Prop 98."
In his piece Fensterwald writes one of the clearer explanations of Prop 98:
Proposition 98 was passed [1988] to create a minimum funding level for K-12 and community colleges of about 40 percent of the General Fund, though the amount will vary yearly based on various “tests.” Whenever the Legislature moves items in and out of Prop 98, it goes through an adjustment process to weigh the impact on the Prop 98 obligation. It’s called rebenching, but Rick Simpson, deputy chief of staff for Assembly Speaker John Perez and key adviser to the Legislature for decades, reminds me that it’s a term of art, not found in Prop 98. The courts have not yet ruled on the legality and methods for rebenching, although the California School Boards Association is suing the state over a related move by Brown and the Legislature this year...(in the current budget, Brown and the Legislature moved some state services to counties and cities. To pay for this realignment, they diverted revenue from 1.06 percent of the state sales tax, worth $5 billion, from the General Fund. Doing so also subtracted $2 billion that would have gone to Prop 98. CSBA has sued over this point.)
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