The House Committee’s Version of the Education Budget

The Alabama House Ways and Means Education committee gave a favorable report to its version of the Education Trust Fund budget yesterday. It approved a package of bills, including the actual budget, a pay raise bill, and additional ordinary appropriation bills.

Lots of news folks provided good coverage, including the Montgomery Advertiser, al.com, and the Associated Press.

While the education budget still has a long way to go, we are keeping up with the evolution of the budget in a spreadsheet, seen below.

The full House could consider the budget as early as next week.

House members have said they hope to approve both the Education and General Fund budgets before spring break (the last week of March).

Takeaways:

• 4% raise for public education (certificated and support) employees making less than $75,000
• 2% raise for public education (certificated and support) employees making $75,000 or more
• 4% raise for all community college personnel
• Divisors were adjusted downward for grades 7 through 12, which means an additional 475 teachers can be hired for those grades. (Details below.)
• Classroom instructional support stands at $659.84 per unit. (Details below.)
• Textbook allocation stands at $54.07 per student.

A few tables to consider.

First, the split between K-12, higher education, and “other” allocations.

Next, a look at classroom divisors. Note that divisors are not the same thing as class size. Divisors are used in the state Foundation Program to calculate the number of teacher units allocated to each school. Basically, you take the number of children in the grade range for each district, then divide that number of children by the divisor to determine how many state-funded teacher units will be funded.

Here’s a great primer on how state Foundation Program funding works.

Here’s a look at classroom instructional support, mostly allocated by teacher unit. Textbook allocations are awarded per student.

Finally, here’s a look at the state minimum salary schedule with the 4% raise incorporated. Here’s the current state minimum salary schedule. 

And here’s the spreadsheet of all of the figures we are tracking. Download the full spreadsheet here. Remember, this is a work in progress.

These numbers are compiled from the Alabama State Department of Education’s budget presentation and from Alabama Legislative Office Budget Spreadsheets.