The Schwarzenegger administration has responded, in a letter to federal officials, to education groups’ charges that the state violated rules for qualifying for remaining stimulus money from the feds. Herb Schultz, the governor’s overseer of stimulus dollars, made it clear in an accompanying statement that he was peeved that advocates would have the audacity to “try to stand in the way of securing nearly a half a billion dollars in critical funding for our education system during these difficult economic times.” And, or course, he denied anything improper.
The education groups say it’s the Schwarzenegger administration that is standing in the way of hundreds of millions of dollars due schools under the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. They wrote the U.S. Department of Education that the governor’s proposed and past budgets shorted K-12 schools money in violation of the requirement that states maintain levels of education spending as a prerequisite for receiving billions of dollars. They said that Schwarzenegger had used accounting tricks to make it look like the state was in compliance, when it actually would have to increase K-12 spending by at least $600 million. The groups included the Education Coalition (school boards association, CTA and the administrators’ association) and a coalition of organizations led by Public Advocates.
The arguments center on accounting rules: how Schwarzenegger handled repayment of past Proposition 98 obligations and whether it improperly deferred money for low-achieving schools under QEIA (Quality Education Investment Act), which was created through a court settlement with the California Teachers Assn. Schultz said the state handled it properly and accused that the organizations of deliberately misinforming the feds.
The organizations also charged that the governor’s proposed gas-tax swap, replacing the sales tax on gasoline with an excise tax, was a deliberate effort to lower the state’s spending obligation under Prop 98. Schultz’ letter doesn’t address that issue.
