Ohio Senate slashes spending, schools plan COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An Ohio Senate rewrite of the state budget guts Gov. Ted Strickland's school-funding plan and makes $650 million in cuts to meet new, lower revenue projections.
The Republican-led Senate's $53.3 billion, two-year spending blueprint increases money to school districts at least a quarter percent in its first year and half a percent in its second year. That includes public charter schools, whose funding had been cut.
But the Senate erased the fundamentals of Strickland's sweeping school reforms -- including statewide all-day kindergarten, new tutors, nurses and counselors, revised graduation requirements, and lower student-teacher ratios.
Strickland spokeswoman Amanda Wurst said the governor proposed a modernized, accountable education system and is disappointed to see his ideas jettisoned.
"Today's economic conditions are exactly why we must act by strengthening Ohio's schools," she said.
The Senate cuts include $417 million in funding to state agencies and $42 million in Medicaid expenses, and incorporate another $200 million in additional service cuts on agencies made under a cost-trimming executive order by Strickland.
Senate President Bill Harris said his chamber's version of the budget retained a committee that will continue to study Strickland's evidence-based education approach.
During the bill's unveiling Friday, Sen. Dale Miller of Cleveland, the Finance Committee's ranking Democrat, questioned why the Senate would want to return to the state's existing funding formula, which has been repeatedly declared unconstitutional.
Finance Chairman John Carey said Strickland included a sweeping vision in the plan that was largely unpaid for, and his new formula sent more state dollars to some wealthy districts while harming some poorer ones.
"In the Senate, we have a balanced budget that is paid for where no school district is being cut," he said.
Wurst said it is imprudent to "continue throwing money at a flawed system" rather than coming up with a new approach.
State Rep. Steve Dyer, a Democrat who spearheaded the House education changes, said the House formula scrapped by the Senate "was the most effective and efficient formula the state's ever seen in driving money to the districts that needed it.
"When the public is able to put these plans side by side and see what happens to districts under each model, they're going to see it's very clear the evidence-based model as sent over by the House is a superior model to what's been sent over by the Senate," he said.
But House Republican Leader Bill Batchelder said the Senate GOP made tough decisions House Democrats failed to make.
"The budget created by the governor and the House Democrats was fiscally irresponsible," he said in a statement. "It increased government spending in a time when Ohio's families are personally having to cut back, and it set Ohioans up for a major tax increase in two years."
Charter school supporters immediately praised the Senate's bill.
"The Senate's restoration of funding for Ohio's charter schools provides a lifeline to more than 80,000 public school students and their families," said Bill Sims, president of the Ohio Association of Public Charter Schools.
Public school advocates expressed disappointment in the plan, which includes a provision that would close failing public schools in much the same way the state has called for shuttering failing charter schools.
"What distinguishes the plan is its absence of any vision for the future," said Bill Leibensperger, vice president of the Ohio Education Association. "And right now, at a time when the state is in the darkest economic time in its history, to put forth this kind of Band-Aid approach is just terribly, terribly disappointing."
The plan also eliminated a requirement the health care plans cover adult children up to age 29, a provision senators saw as expensive and harmful to small insurance providers, and a mandate that insurers cover autism disorders.
But lobbyist Gayle Channing, who co-chairs a coalition of social service groups fighting budget cuts, commended the Senate for preserving important many programs for poor and low-income Ohioans, especially seniors and children. Those included the Help Me Grow program, the kinship care program that allows foster children to stay with relatives, and an expansion of health care coverage to needy children.
"They did everything they could to protect the people who need those services in these hard economic times," she said.
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