The Joint Budget Committee spent a full day setting figures for the Department of Education and Department of Human Services long bills, navigating a roughly $36 million remaining shortage in Education and contested cuts to social safety-net programs. Key flashpoints included a deadlocked debate over capping $56.7 million in Charter School Institute mill levy equalization, a failed vote on food bank grant cuts, and sharp divisions over TANF policy rollbacks and SNAP error-rate funding.
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Representative Rick Taggart and Senator Kirkmeyer both voted no, with Taggart arguing counties already have granular error rate data and cautioning against the assumption that 'our counties don't know what the root causes are.' Vice Chair Bridges and others voted yes, with Bridges arguing the team would provide foundational data and analysis to set up broader reform conversations for success. JBC staff described the SNAP error rate as 'an existential issue' but acknowledged he 'couldn't come up with a reasonably scoped proposal' for a larger fix.
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“I for one don't understand why we keep having this discussion when we have those types of numbers and when we understand. I mean, I do understand and I do know what we did when we said that we were going to have the cpu, csi, MILW equalization. And I do know that it was simply about trying to close the funding gap between district peers. And I still think it should be in place. So no, I would not support legislation for this. And if you want to make these kind of big policy changes, take it up across the street.”
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Sign in to subscribeThe joint budget committee will come to order. We are returning to figure setting for the Department of Education, accepting public school finance and categoricals. Ms. Bickle, are we on page 150? 154, yes. All right. Okay. So we are revisiting another program that was created quite a few years ago. 23, 24, there was 24.5 million that was put into this academic accelerator math grant program. Yeah. And it. And so I don't have a lot of information about what's going on, but it sounds like there might be 1.5 million that you could recapture, you know, from 26, 27. It's been slower. The rollout's been slower than anticipated. My understanding is it looks quite a bit like the out of school time grant program, except for that with a math lens on it. So it's sort of like after school stuff that's with a math focus. And it's taken a while to get going. It seemed like they really used the first two years as planning grants. And so there's expectation there will be more money spent this year and next. But again, still seemed like you could take some money back without. I mean, or you could…
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