Our lawmakers are once again at a crossroads, figuring out how to manage the tremendous decline in revenues for public services, including schools. Time is running out.

Constant readers will notice the shortage of news on the state K-12 education budget in recent months. There is a good reason: there hasn’t been any.

The House Appropriations subcommittee on School Aid held hearings on next year’s school aid budget, and made preliminary decisions about how to use Federal stimulus money.

Final decisions for this year await further news on what’s happening to revenue collections for school aid. As reported from the subcommittee, the bill uses Federal stimulus (ARRA) money to restore virtually all the cuts recommended in the Governor’s original budget, which had been formed before the stimulus bills were passed.

The House version of the sinking fund bill was reported out by the Education committee yesterday, coming much closer to passage in the Democrat-controlled chamber.

State officials are saying that cuts to schools may be disallowed under the federal stimulus legislation.

State Sen. Gretchen Whitmer (D-East Lansing) has once again introduced a bill that would broaden the use of sinking funds by school districts. As we discussed in this article and in a legislative wrap-up below, sinking funds are property-tax supported funds earmarked for school capital projects.

As part of a new effort to beef up grassroots lobbying efforts, the Michigan Association of School Boards (MASB) rolled out a new advocacy web site powered by CapWiz, a grassroots advocacy system offered by Washington, DC-based Capitol Advantage.

While the economic news was bad, school funding didn’t take a huge hit in 2008. Part of this was because of the increase in income tax rates for FY08 (really a restoration of the rates in effect a few years ago), and because of earmarking from the new Michigan Business Tax. The other reason is that Michigan as a whole has been losing students, and since state money is paid out on a per-pupil basis, that means the state’s overall obligations are lower. That’s small comfort for districts that lose both students and money, even if their foundation allowance crept up a bit.

25 March — Numbers, numbers, everywhere. Lots of numbers have been tossed around — $377 million deficit in the School Aid Fund, $220 per pupil reduction, and more — but when you look at the details these numbers don’t always seem to add up. Thanks to non-partisan staffers in Lansing (at the Senate and House Fiscal Agencies), information is available on the web that helps clear up some of the confusion, even if the underlying problems remain unchanged.

21 March — The top-level negotiations among the Granholm administration and Democratic and Republican legislative leaders continued today, but news was thin on the ground. Press reports indicate that the largest sticking point so far was the Republican caucus’ insistence that no revenue measures be considered for balancing the FY07 budget, and keeping the problem of the current fiscal year separate from plans for next year (fiscal 2008).