Sandoval modifying education block grants over school objections

Senior staff told lawmakers Monday they are making some changes to Gov. Brian Sandoval's proposed K-12 block grant program to make it more acceptable to school superintendents.

"The districts told us 'yes, we want this flexibility but we don't want this block grant program,'" said Senior policy advisor Dale Erquiaga.

The original proposed budget created a block grant program by eliminating mandates for such programs as class size reduction, all-day kindergarten, career and technical education, gifted and talented programs and early childhood education - putting the money dedicated to them into one pot.

He told a joint Senate Finance/Assembly Ways and Means subcommittee as a result of the concerns raised by superintendents, the plan now is to delay creation of the fund and elimination of those mandates until the second year of the biennium.

Subcommittee chairwoman Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, said she is concerned the result would still be that many of those programs would simply go away.

Erquiaga said the administration still would propose school districts consider them as priorities, but that each school district should decide how much of its money should go for each of them.

"I see nothing in the actions of the school boars that indicates they would abolish these programs," he said. He told lawmakers there are huge differences in the different school districts which range from more than 300,000 students to less than 100 and that their needs are very different.

"The superintendents should be able to prepare a plan for how they would spend that block grant money," he said.

Those programs still would, however, be cut 10 percent this coming fiscal year.

Nye County superintendent Rob Roberts, president of the superintendents' association, said the money is the crux of the problem.

"We need the flexibility but we need the money to do the job," he said.

He said districts definitely want more flexibility than they have under the current system, which spells out how much each of those programs gets in each district and how it should be spent. But he said the block grants aren't the answer because eliminating the current rules would have a severe impact especially in tough economic times.

He said counselors, librarians and everything else not specifically tied to the classroom would go away.

"The classroom is the thing you must protect," Roberts said. "Everything else would go by the wayside."

Erquiaga said details of the revised plan still are being worked out including formulas for distributing the money among the districts but assured lawmakers and educators in the room that the intent is to make sure each district receives the same percentage of total funding it does under the current system so that some districts aren't shorted by the change.