FY 08 Budget Finally Implemented

The General Assembly voted last week to accept Governor Blagojevich's amendatory veto of the BIMP so the bill is finally law! The Illinois State Board of Education is busy calculating financial data so that school districts can receive the funds approved by HB 783. It is too bad that this process has lasted 6 months longer than necessary and many school districts have lost significant dollars due to the cost of borrowing money to replace state funds that were not distributed. Some of the education provisions for the BIMP include:

Distribution of ADA School Safety and Educational Black Grant funds to non-public schools which will reduce the share of funds that we will receive. Obviously, there are some political deals that have been made to use these funds for non-public purposes which is not right. Originally, $10 million additional dollars had been appropriated for the non-public schools, but that amount was not included in the BIMP. Therefore, public schools will see their share of these crucial funds reduced. It will be interesting to see if there are any constitutional challenges to spending public funds on non-public schools.

Increased reimbursement for special education teachers that will bring an additional $1,000 per certified teacher and $700 per paraprofessional to each district. The reimbursement formula has not been increased since 1985 and should be adjusted each year until it equals approximately 1/3 of the average teacher salary.

Foundation level funding will increase by $400 per student. The foundation level is now $5,734. Center Cass District 66 will not receive nearly that amount due to the “alternate funding formula” used to calculate our state aid. Since our District has a high amount of Equalized Assessed Valuation (EAV), we are severely limited in the amount of state aide we receive. I estimate that we will receive about a $15 per student increase.