Alabama Senate passes record education budget

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There’s one thing Alabama lawmakers are required to do each session — that’s pass the budgets. Legislators spent time this week working toward that goal as the Senate approved a record-setting education budget. We hear about that other legislative happenings with Todd Stacy, host of Capital Journal on Alabama Public Television.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Give us some highlights of this education spending package.

You said it’s a record and that’s correct. Everybody’s pretty happy about that. Of course, that’s because the revenue is there. The economy is still strong. The Education Trust Fund is basically funded off of sales tax and income tax. The base budget is about $9.9 billion. Then you throw on top supplemental appropriations, advancement in technology funds, and it all ends up totaling more than $12 billion. So that’s quite a bit of money. More than we’ve ever seen before.

They are making strategic investments in the Literacy Act, the Numeracy Act. Trying to get kids moving in the right direction on math and reading specifically. But this is across the board. Everybody got a little bit more in their line item than they got last year. At the same time, (Senate Education Budget) Chairman Arthur Orr has been warning that, “Look. We’re in good times right now in terms of revenue, but if there is an economic downturn, that could change.” And so they continue to put a lot of money into savings, into rainy day accounts, should the days actually get rainy.

The Senate also approved a bill that would make changes to how public schools are funded in Alabama. Remind us what those changes are.

Right now we are under what’s called the foundation program. It was really from the 1930s. It was updated in the 1990s. So it’s pretty dated and essentially it works like this. However many students you have in your school, you get a certain dollar amount based on that head count and every student is kind of the same. But a lot of newer research has shown that it just costs a lot more to educate certain students specifically English language learners, kids with special needs, kids in poverty and gifted students. So those are the four categories that they’ve identified that it just costs more for school districts to educate that child.

So under this new funding formula, should it pass, those four categories would get a little more funding. If you have a certain amount of special needs students, certain amount English language learners and so on, their funding would be weighted. You get a little bit more and so it helps schools actually deal with those additional costs of educating those populations. A lot of other states have gone to this, Tennessee most recently, and it’s talked about in terms of kind of modernizing our school funding process.

I wonder if there’s any pushback about all this money going to education, given that times may not always be so flush.

Yeah, and I actually talked with Senator Arthur Orr about that for Capital Journal, because I was a little surprised. Anytime you upset the Apple cart, somebody’s going to not like that, right? And talk about, you know, billions in school funding. So they went kind of a halfway route. They’re going with this hybrid model that keeps the foundation model in place, but just kind of on top of that, you’ll have these extra dollars for these weighted categories.

This is not willy-nilly. This task force has worked for a year to identify just the right kind of policies. They’ve built support and the locals are really happy about it. Because if you do have a lot of English language learners, or you do have a lotta kids in poverty, you don’t get any extra money for that right now. And so that obviously comes out of your local coffers. So the local superintendents, the local principals are really happy that this is looking like it’s gonna pass.

Finally, a House committee held a public hearing on a bill this week that aims to crack down on illegal immigration, but it got strong pushback from immigrant rights groups. Give us a sense of that debate.

Immigration continues to be a theme of this session. A lot of bills have been proposed to kind of align Alabama law enforcement with what’s going on at the federal level with Trump in office now. And so this actually kind of is a throwback to the HB 56 immigration fight and, and how so much of that got thrown out by the courts. It’s kind of trying to go back and say, we want to establish a new crime, repeal the old laws, and establish a new crime of human smuggling. That’s what this specific bill is getting at, is concealing someone that’s here illegally, things like that, the crime of humans smuggling.

Many times it’s the eye of the beholder in terms of what exactly constitutes human trafficking, and so that’s what the immigrant groups were talking about. I think in the end, it’s probably going to pass, given the Republican supermajority. But you’re right that immigrant groups and some Democrats have pushed back on this and kind of what it would mean in practice.