SB 2017-142: Return Education to the Regions Act (Passed)

[Associate Justice PiT]

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Atlasian People's House of Representatives
Passed 9-0 in the Atlasian House Assembled,


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Sponsor: Spiral

     I hereby open the floor for debate.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

This originally started off as an 1184AZ bill, but was picked up by Peebs back in April I think. It has taken a while to get an arrangement people would agree on and it was sidelined for a while because of Healthcare taking up most of my attention.


The basic idea is to reduce the DoE's operating budget for administration and overhead and distributes that money to the 50 poorest school districts or Local Education Authorities. These administrative capacities being cut, will be freed up as a result of Sections 1 and 2, to enable such a reduction in the first place.

[ZuWo]

I approve of the core idea of this bill. Pre-reset Atlasia suffered from a Senate that took away too many powers from the regions so it's great to see a bill which makes it possible for the regions to deal with a critical issue such as education as they see fit.

[Blair]

As someone who know has the joy of having to work to devise the regional educational set up (through the Assembly) I've got a number of questions, and issues, that I hope my former colleagues in the Senate can help with.

1.) Is the 2018 date workable? I have a feeling that this was written in a while ago, when 2018 seemed a long way off but the reality is that we're going to give the regions two months (including the infamously slow December) to create their educational system.

2.) How drastic will the 25% cut be?I know that it's generally popular to support cutting administration based costs (and the first thing that you look to cut) but I'm wondering just how drastic the 25% cut would be, and what effects it would have.

I have concerns that whilst this bill does something that is largely popular, it could face some problems later on

[PPT Spiral]

I will assume sponsorship since no one else has.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

As someone who know has the joy of having to work to devise the regional educational set up (through the Assembly) I've got a number of questions, and issues, that I hope my former colleagues in the Senate can help with.

1.) Is the 2018 date workable? I have a feeling that this was written in a while ago, when 2018 seemed a long way off but the reality is that we're going to give the regions two months (including the infamously slow December) to create their educational system.

2.) How drastic will the 25% cut be?I know that it's generally popular to support cutting administration based costs (and the first thing that you look to cut) but I'm wondering just how drastic the 25% cut would be, and what effects it would have.

I have concerns that whilst this bill does something that is largely popular, it could face some problems later on

The dates should be pushed back.

Not because they "only have two months", but because they were required to start a month ago. Fiscal Year 2018 began October 1st, 2017.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Senators have 24 hours to object to Senator Spiral assuming sponsorship.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I will assume sponsorship since no one else has.

LIBERTARIAN SPIRAL SHALL RISE AGAIN!!!!

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

I would like an answer to Blair's second question before I decide whether I can support this.

[Anna Komnene]

I'm concerned about the 25% cut too. Also what does it mean? We haven't had an official budget yet have we? Does that mean that 25% of whatever gets allocated to education in the committee right now gets cut?

[Associate Justice PiT]

I'm concerned about the 25% cut too. Also what does it mean? We haven't had an official budget yet have we? Does that mean that 25% of whatever gets allocated to education in the committee right now gets cut?

     I suspect that this is probably the case, but such a point should be clarified.

[PPT Spiral]

Giving power to the regions to decide how to mold their curriculum is a worthy cause in my opinion. What's best for one group may not be best for all, so seeing resources allocated for the regions while still maintaining the integrity of the public school system is an ideal we should work towards. With that said, I do agree with many here and will have to respectfully differ from my friend Speaker Yankee on the 25% cut. We should try to narrow the focus on the administrative side and see what can be done to reasonably streamline the process.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     This bill has sat on the Senate floor for some time. The composition of the Senate is the same, so everyone present should have seen this. If there are no further comments, I can take this to a final vote in 24 hours.

[Anna Komnene]

I don't much like the idea of bringing this bill to a vote when there seems to be Senators who'd like to amend the bill differently. I can say that I will be a nay on the bill as is.

I could propose an amendment myself but it would be along the lines of striking the entirety of section 3, so I've been hesitant to do so. If another Senator would like to propose something different, I'm all ears.

I wonder if we might want to make some additions to the curriculum part. I get that the idea is to leave a lot of leeway to the regions to decide, but I feel like American history, at the very least, should be a national (and not a regional) requirement for all students to take.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

We haven't had an official budget yet have we? Does that mean that 25% of whatever gets allocated to education in the committee right now gets cut?

The committee is not allocating anything that the Congress had not already passed. The whole plan was to compile all passed spending and revenue legislation or portions of legislation and add it together using the RL FY 2016 as the baseline, since that is what we are presently operating under having inherited it from the reset to find out, "where we are" and then pass that without any changes so that we have a recognized official budget and thereby avoid the downgrade. My assumption was that this underlying bill would either pass before hand or get delayed until after process was complete.


So to answer the question posed, the 25% cut would relative to the FY2016 spending levels in RL, unless of course some in game bill has passed since the June 2016 reset that would have altered those levels.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I would like an answer to Blair's second question before I decide whether I can support this.

The idea is to substantial reduce the amount of curriculum decision making being done at the Federal level, and then taking that freed up money and issuing it to the poorest school districts who struggle to make repairs and so forth.

The 25% number was one that I came up with towards the end of the debate in the House. And I would note that it passed unanimously.  The original number was 1%.

I would be willing to accept a reduced percentage.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Giving power to the regions to decide how to mold their curriculum is a worthy cause in my opinion. What's best for one group may not be best for all, so seeing resources allocated for the regions while still maintaining the integrity of the public school system is an ideal we should work towards. With that said, I do agree with many here and will have to respectfully differ from my friend Speaker Yankee on the 25% cut. We should try to narrow the focus on the administrative side and see what can be done to reasonably streamline the process.

With all do respect Senator, the simple fact is that the integrity of the public school system is something that we have let fall by the wayside. We have districts that do not have revenue capacity to support adequate public schools and adequate facilities, materials and so forth and that means that a lot of people are being denied a good education and a chance at a better life.

Some of these districts, be they rural or inner city were long plagued by lack of revenue, others were deprived of revenue as a result of factory outsourcing depriving the community of property tax paying, middle class factory workers. And we have done nothing, nothing to replace this lost revenue for these communities to make sure that there school system's don't decline. The result in its absence has been a tremendous decline, instead. It goes without saying, that the ones most impacted are minority school districts.

The purpose of this bill has been to get money out of the hands of Nyman bureaucrats and send it back to Main Street Atlasian schools where it will be put to use in the repairing of facilities, acquiring of text books and technology and so forth. At the same time, it seeks to begin moving control of education back to the regions, which was promised in the Constitutional Convention, is good for them and good for the game. It would be extremely unfortunate, if after the all promises made by Senator Spiral's endorsed ticket about strong regions, that this opportunity to begin that process of regionalizing education would be left to fall by the way side.

Now while I apologize for not being able to keep as on top of this bill thread as I would have liked, I must say that I am extremely disappointed that no one sent me a message to directly to alert me to the questions needing to be answered. I have a lot that I am working on, including the budget, and a really horrible work schedule in real life on top of it. It would have taken five seconds to PM me a reminder to get your questions answered, but I am certain that were it not for the President, who is not even in this chamber, these questions would have gone unanswered and this Senate would have voted this bill down. I don't get this passive resistance towards PMing people when it matters, because we seem to have no problem doing it at election time. But sh**t, got a question about a bill, and it seems be asking too much to have some say "hey check education bill, need answer to my questions". And you wonder why little of value ever gets done around here.

The thought that rather then engaging and taking action to address a severe plight facing our poor and minority communities, with regards to our education system is just simply barbaric, BARBARIC!!! If you don't like this present design, then by all means, offer an alternative. Several people contributed to this bill in the House, AZ, Peebs, Truman, myself come to mind. This bill dying out of passivity and disinterest would be a crime of monumental proportions. I think I can end with no better call, then to quote the esteemed Poirot in saying, "Think of the Children!".

[Anna Komnene]

I'm very skeptical that this bill is going to help the poor. It cuts 25% of the education budget which serves over 14,000 public school districts according to the census and reallocates the money to building equipment in 50 of them. That is less than one percent of the school districts in the whole country. I understand that a lot of the education budget comes from the local level but that doesn't mean they aren't getting federal help and when they lose that help, they'll be under a big burden to figure out a way to cover that lost money.

What exactly are the rest of the 99% of schools to do when they receive this massive cut? I'd guess this would likely see thousands of teachers losing their jobs - who btw aren't people who tend to make very much money for their contributions to society. I've been around education long enough to know that the first people to go when budgets are cut are always the teachers. In fact, I have teacher friends who've been let go three different times due to budget cuts before finally finding a district where they were able to stick. It doesn't have anything to do with teacher quality. It's just whoever happens to be at the bottom of the totem pole. When you decide that it's no longer necessary to teach Spanish or Art, that means letting go Spanish and Art teachers. Even Math and English departments suffer from this kind of thing when districts decide that they have too many teachers than they can afford and that leads to students having larger class sizes.

I guess this might be workable if we dramatically lower the percent cut and also dramatically raise the number of districts allocated to, but I'm still very wary of what's going to happen to the districts that aren't included that won't be seeing anything from this bill other than a likelihood of dramatic decreases of any federal support they might be getting.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

So the 25% figure is arbitrary, Yankee?  I'm not comfortable supporting anywhere near such a large cut without knowing how this would directly affect the DoE, teachers, or schools which might be forced to close due to inadequate funds, thereby increasing class sizes and teacher shortages.

Also, is there a reason science is not part of the federal curriculum?  I don't think nixing science as a requirement is a good idea at all when Atlasian students lag behind other countries on academic performance in this subject.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

I echo the concerns of several other Senators. A 25% cut in education spending seems like an arbitrarily chosen figure that could have major consequences for our education system. I also believe that we should pass a 2017 budget before we cut education spending, instead of relying on figures from a budget that was passed over a year ago. The allocation of government spending, specifically that on education, could be very different for this year than it was for last year.

[Anna Komnene]

I think there's probably four paths forward here (there might be more )

1. We lower the cut and raise the number of districts helped by the re-allocation - or redefine the way it's allocated to have the DoE/SoIA define a poverty threshold with districts that meet that criteria receiving the money.

2. We scrap section 3 entirely and replace it with a scheme for impoverished districts to apply for grants to receive more money from the DoE/SoIA.

3. We scrap section 3 entirely and don't replace it with anything.

4. If people are totally opposed to the bill, we just vote it down.

And beyond that we might want to consider some amendments to the curriculum regarding science and/or history.

[Anna Komnene]

Okay, I'll take a poke at the curriculum while we think about the other stuff. I'm also wondering what exactly this "career course" for 4 years would be. I didn't have anything like that in my school.

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[Associate Justice PiT]

     I would note that the amendment should note who proposed it and the amendment number, like so:

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[Anna Komnene]

Gotcha. Thanks for reminding me. Am I supposed to let you handle the amendments in these threads PiT? Oops!

[Associate Justice PiT]

Gotcha. Thanks for reminding me. Am I supposed to let you handle the amendments in these threads PiT? Oops!

     I do handle these threads in their entirety, but that's alright. It proved to be a learning experience for you.