As a W-SR school board member and candidate for Iowa House District 57, I am compelled to respond to some of the misleading claims made by Pat Grassley in his recent article “Big wins in House File 2612”.
Supplemental State Aid, or SSA, is the amount the state legislature will allow the education cost of a pupil to grow from one year to the next. Any change to the SSA rate is decided every year and theoretically should closely follow inflation, but lately this has not been the case. For example, in 2022, Pat Grassley and the Iowa Legislature assigned an SSA increase of 2.4%, but the inflation rate for that year was 6.5%. In other words, our public schools were not given enough spending authority in 2022 to cover the increased costs of educating our children. Sadly, Iowa’s funding of public schools has been less than the inflation rate over the last decade.
There are currently nine Area Education Agencies (AEAs) in Iowa. They provide a range of service to Iowa school districts, the most notable being special education. Towards understanding how important AEAs are, first imagine an AEA as a toolbox funded by the state. This AEA toolbox contains education services, media, and equipment that would altogether cost too much for most districts to afford on their own. So, instead of every school district purchasing their own set of tools (expensive), they simply access whatever specialty tool or service they need from their local AEA.
The key to the AEA system is that smaller rural districts benefit the most because they gain access to the AEA toolbox at a lower cost than larger school districts. They effectively receive more than they put in, thereby raising the quality of education in their district. A good system, right? Yes – and it has been working well for over fifty years and nationally recognized for its merit.
A large part of Pat Grassley’s HF2612 bill is not a win for Iowans. As you will read below, the result will be an emptier AEA toolbox. Smaller school districts, like North Butler and Clarksville Community school districts, are especially going to struggle to provide educational services to their students as result of this bill.
- First, let’s be clear: a 2.5% SSA is woefully inadequate and will result in over 40% of Iowa school districts levying local property tax to make up their budget discrepancy.
- Teachers are underpaid in Iowa and this is a direct result of Pat Grassley and the Iowa Legislature underfunding our public schools for years. This bill’s correction in teacher pay was overdue, should have had its own focus, and dealt with separately from the rest of the HF2612 bill. Is it a win? Yes! Is it a sugar coating for the damaging AEA sections of the bill? Yes!
- Starting in Fall of 2025, this bill diverts all media and education services funding ($68 million) and 10% of special education funding from the AEAs to the school districts. That’s less direct media and education funding going to AEA to meet the needs of the schools and the children they serve.
- Incredibly, HF2612 actually allows school districts to flexibly spend $68 million of those diverted funds on general needs. Considering the underfunding of school districts over the last decade, schools may be tempted to spend those funds to shore up general expenditures instead of passing the funds on to the AEA for shared services or for their intended use, such as teacher development.
- While, it is true that HF2612 does not directly terminate employees of the AEAs, the uncertainty around the bill, and its eventual passage, has had a destabilizing impact on those agencies. Highly qualified staff are, and will be, leaving in droves. As of this writing, 118 staff have voluntarily left the Central Rivers and Grant Wood AEAs in the last few months. Central Rivers, which serves Bremer and Butler county schools, has now lost their Chief Administrator, their Executive Director of Educational Services, and their Executive Director of Special Education, which are the top three leaders of the organization. The HF2612 bill has already begun to disrupt AEAs’ ability to deliver special education services to our children.
- Grassley wrote that the bill does not put the AEAs under the Department of Education (DE). Yet, the DE, under a new Director who has no experience in PK-12 school administration or teaching, will now be charged, among other things, to oversee AEA operations for compliance, resolve AEA accreditation removal, approve AEA budgets, and approve all AEA professional development programs. Going further, the DE will be embedding their employees into the AEA for “accountability” purposes.
The larger AEA section of HF2612 is devastatingly bad for Iowans and their children. If the intent of this bill was to increase special education achievement of Iowa students, it has already failed. This is not a win, and we deserve better.
