Last week, funding for kindergarten through 12th grade was signed by Governor Terry Branstad ahead of the start of the next fiscal year.

District 47 Representative Chip Baltimore voted in favor of the 1.1 percent increase in state supplemental aid, or $40 million of additional money. He says while that isn’t a lot of money, the House felt it was a conservative approach, due to state revenues not coming as what they were predicted to be by the Revenue Estimating Conference. The Representative from Boone describes an additional measure that was put in the funding bill to help school districts.

“One of the things we did, as part of this effort, was to give schools more flexibility for spending money out of those different accounts, trying to give them flexibility based upon the characteristics of their own district.”

Baltimore is happy that they were able to get supplemental state aid set as early as they did in the session, due to the Democrats controlling the Senate in the past.

“We had to negotiate with the other party that controlled the Senate. So there’s substantial disagreements on that and it took some time and required not only compromise, but required us to put that off for a while. We both kind of put out our own respective proposals and then sit there and negotiate with each other, that would take a lot of time.”

 The legislature set school funding for this fiscal year and next as well.