With the next fiscal year budget squared away by the Iowa Legislature, one lawmaker is commenting on one of the single largest areas within that budget.

District 24 Senator Jesse Green served his first year as the Senate Education Sub-Appropriations Committee Chair, which has just over a $1 billion budget. Green explains that the community colleges received the largest increase for the next fiscal year at 7.5 percent. 

“My thinking on that is, they have a very large footprint in Iowa, (and) they serve the needs of the communities that they are in. They just went through a formulation change last year to where they needed some extra funds to equalize the schools with that new formula. So next year, I might be a little bit tighter when it comes to the community colleges.”   

Green describes another line item in the education sub appropriations committee budget that had a healthy increase in funding.

“One of my personal things within the ed budget that I really cared about was the Teach Iowa program, which it incentivizes teachers to go into at-needs positions. And if they serve in those positions for a long enough period of time, they get some loan forgiveness. And so I actually increased that (by) 50 percent.”  

Green adds some other areas of interest that also had increases included the Board of Regents getting a $5.5 million increase for the public universities and a $300,000 increase for the Iowa Jobs for America’s Graduates (iJAG) program. He says of the over $9 billion state budget, $478 million of new money was added, with about half going to public education and the other half to Medicaid.