The Governor’s Proposed FY15 Education Trust Fund Budget – Just the Numbers

Last week, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley unveiled his budget proposals for both the Education Trust Fund (ETF) and State General Fund (SGF) budgets. Open up the PDFs available from the Legislative Fiscal Office (LFO) to be dazzled and amazed. The numbers might look big, but they are not what the State Board of Education (SBOE) requested to fund K-12 public education for 741,000 of Alabama’s children next year.

The final budget likely will come out looking a bit different by the time it makes it through the House and the Senate. Check out the spreadsheets below to get a quick picture of what the Governor’s priorities are.

Takeaways from the Governor’s recommendation:

• $136.5 million more for the K-12 foundation program, for a total of $3.5 billion.
• That amount is higher than the FY07 ETF appropriation of $3.4 billion, but still doesn’t hit the FY08 appropriation of $3.7 billion.
• $12.2 million more for transportation, though it is unclear how much of that is for transportation operations and maintenance and how much is for the purchase of new buses.
• The split between Higher education and K-12 students is just about the exact same as it was in FY14. (Here’s a refresher on why that matters.)
• None of the SBOE’s additional programs (Professional Pathways, Innovation Zone Grants, and Learning Supports) received a recommendation for funding from the Governor.

Pictured below is the Governor’s FY15 recommendation compared with the SBOE’s FY15 request, downloadable in Google Docs for your enjoyment. Click the picture to make it larger.

Here is the full ETF spreadsheet (downloadable in Google Docs), with indicators added showing whether the Governor recommended higher, lower, or level funding. A number of appropriations from previous years have been eliminated in the Governor’s recommendation, indicated by which fiscal year the appropriation was eliminated. The line item numbers match with the PDF from the LFO web site (don’t you love acronyms?).

And finally, here’s a table of state agencies other than Alabama public K-12 and Higher Education, funded through the ETF. These appropriations, titled “other” in the ETF budget, account for nearly $320 million of the available $6 billion. For more details about these appropriations, you have to view the Google spreadsheet or the LFO’s PDF.

[Updated 11:05 a.m., January 24 to correct “million” to “billion”. Thanks, Charlotte!]