SD House Tries Again on Zero Increase for Education, Adds Disabled Kids to Chopping Block

Two interesting actions on education by the South Dakota Legislature:

• Some serious hoghousage: House Appropriations grabbed from the table SB 22, which originally called for establishing a private fund to keep Birth to 3 Connections afloat. The committee deleted all text and substituted their own version of HB 1050, which would zero the increase in the per student allocation in the state school funding formula for the coming school year. The Governor made this proposal at the start of the session; the House unanimously tabled that bad idea last month. The resurrected version one-ups the Governor's by nixing increases for disabled students as well. Reps. Carson, Deadrick, Peters, Wink, Putnam, and Tidemann voted aye on the hoghouse and sent this second swing at school savings to the House floor.
• The Senate voted 27–1 yesterday to pass HB 1160, which lets any student, home-schooled or otherwise, skip the recommended Regents curriculum and qualify for the Opportunity Scholarship by scoring a 28 on the ACT or a 1280 on the math-verbal portion on the SAT. A herd of senators missed the vote; the only nay came from our man Russell Olson.