The following summary includes education-related proposals from the 2013 state of the state address. To assure that this information reaches you in a timely manner, minimal attention has been paid to style (capitalization, punctuation) or format.
|
Governor Nathan Deal's 2013 State of the State Address
PROPOSALS
P-3
-- Fund 10 days additional pre-K days in the 2014 school year (doing so also increases salaries).
Finance
-- Provide $156M in additional funding for enrollment growth in K-12 schools in FY2013. For next year [2014], there will be $147 million for enrollment growth and salary increases for teachers based on training and experience. There is also an additional $41 million to fully fund the revised Equalization formulas adopted last year.
-- Change the 1985 funding formula to modernize the way we spend tax payer dollars so that we can produce more positive results in our public schools.
Governance and Accountability
-- Use legislation to solve the problem of Georgia having too many school boards placed under the sanctions of potential loss of accreditation. While this is a very serious matter, it is somewhat ironic that the loss of accreditation can only be based on governance issues and not on substandard academic progress of the school system.
Reading/Literacy
-- Include $1.6 million in this year's budget to continue the reading mentor program.
Economic/Workforce Development
-- Focus more funds within our HOPE Grant Program toward occupations where we know jobs are available and shortages actually exist. Currently, there are several thousand jobs available for individuals with a commercial driver's license. There are similar shortages in the areas of nursing and early childhood education. In order to fill these vacancies we suggest directing additional funds within our Technical College HOPE Grants so that over 90 percent of the tuition costs in these programs will be provided.
Postsecondary
--Increase the Hope Scholarship by 3% over last year, bringing the total funds going to Hope in FY 2014 to nearly $600 million
-- Fully consider the Higher Education Funding Commission's recommendation for change from enrollment-based funding to outcomes-based funding in our university and technical colleges.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
P-3
-- Designated by the National Institute for Early Education Research as having 10 out of 10 in measures of quality. Georgia was one of only five states to receive such a designation.
Reading/Literacy
-- Focused on literacy by designating $1.6M to establish a reading mentor's program that was designed to grow the percentage of Georgia's children who are reading on grade level by the 3rd grade.
Full text: http://gov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2013-01-17/deal-focus-foundations-strengthen-georgia
|
|