Kitsap Education

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Dan Steele, of the Washington State School Directors Association, sends out an awesome email almost every day during the legislative session updating folks on what’s happening in Olympia with education. Today was a big day because it was the policy committee cutoff deadline, rendering many bills dead.

Here’s Dan’s update:

With the arrival of today’s policy committee “cut-off” — the first of many self-imposed legislative deadlines — numerous bills are now technically dead. All bills must have passed out of their original house policy committee (that is, House bills adopted by House policy committees; Senate bills adopted by Senate policy committees) by today in order to remain alive. Bills in fiscal committees must be passed out of their original house fiscal committee by Monday, March 2 in order to remain alive. Remember that budget bills and bills considered “necessary to implement the budget” are exempt from these early cut-off deadlines. Also remember that no bill is officially dead until the session adjourns. Most legislative rules, including rules relating to cut-off dates, can be waived by the Legislature.

Because of the level of activity in the last few days, we have not reported on many bills of importance that have made it past the first legislative deadline and remain alive. In the next few days, we’ll provide some information on some of the education-related bills that made it past the first legislative hurdle and remain alive. We’ll also review some of the many bills that are now technically dead, having failed to move from their original house policy committee. WSSDA is currently tracking over 300 bills that have either direct or potential indirect impacts on K-12 education, so we won’t be able to address all of the alive or dead bills we are watching. If a bill of interest to you is not discussed in the next few days in these Updates, we encourage you to use the Legislature’s Web site to get up-to-date information.

The following bills of interest remain alive:

HB 1018/SB 5016 – Eliminating special election dates
HB 1292 – Allowing 180-day school year waivers
HB 1322/SB 5074 – Eliminating mandatory scoliosis screening
HB 1385/SB 5232 – Changing provisions related to school employee sexual misconduct
HB 1619/SB 5807 – Expanding allowable uses of school capital projects funds
HB 1741/SB 5189 – Expanding the list of crimes requiring school employees’ dismissal
HB 1757 – Establishing a small school district contingency fund
HB 1975/SB 5580 – Extending the length of time in which school impact fees must be used
HB 2041/SB 5914 – Implementing a new pupil transportation funding formula
HB 2167/SB 5889 – Eliminating or suspending various education-related unfunded mandates
SB 5379 – Equalizing school district salary allocations
SB 5410 – Updating provisions related to online learning programs
SB 5880 – Eliminating or suspending various education-related unfunded mandates
SB 5890 – Eliminating or suspending various education-related unfunded mandates

Tags: Legislation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 8:23 pm by marietta nelson and is filed under Funding, Legal Stuff, Legislature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.