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Hawaii republicans offered their own ideas Monday on how to prevent public schools from closing seventeen days per year on what has come to be known as furlough Fridays.
In the short term, GOP members are calling on all parties involved in negotiating the current teachers’ contract to get back to the bargaining table.
“We can bring back our 17 days of furlough by opening the contract and allowing for prioritization of classroom spending to be kept,” said House Minority Leader Lynn Finnegan.
Renegotiating the teachers’ contract would require input from the Hawaii State Teachers Association, Gov. Linda Lingle, Schools Superintendent Pat Hamamoto and Board of Education Chairman Garrett Toguchi.
If the HSTA agreed to new contract terms, the state and the Hawaii Government Employees Association would also be forced to renegotiate. As many as one-fourth of all DOE employees, including public school principlas, are covered by the HGEA agreement ratified just last month. The contract calls for 18 furlough days in the first year of the agreement and 24 furlough days in the second year.
As far as long term solutions republicans are focusing on educational reform, which they’ll introduce during the upcoming legislative session in January.
The Keiki Investment and Development of Schools Act of 2010 (KIDS Act) calls for placing the schools superintendent under the governor as a cabinet level position, which Gov. Lingle supports and talked about last month during the first furlough Friday.
The GOP backed legislation also calls on strengthening Hawaii's charter school law and demands the Department of Education be subjected to a managerial audit.
“I'm tired of the people of Hawaii being duped by a system that we're throwing money at,” said Senate Minority Leader Fred Hemmings. “We're spending more and getting less and it's time for them to clean their mess up.”
Of the 13,000 teachers who are HSTA members, Hemmings believes as many as 3,800 don’t actually teach in the classroom.
“There's only about 9,200 to 9,500 in the classroom,” said Hemmings, “the rest got fancy titles.”
DOE spokeswoman Sandy Goya countered Hemmings’ assertion when contacted by Khon2.
Goya said as of September of this year 11,257 teachers were actually in the classroom teaching students. Another 1,290 serve as support staff, for instance librarians or school counselors.
“I think you can definitely say that a large bulk of our teachers are in school,” said Goya.
Still, Hemmings pointed to a 2005 audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers that demonstrates the need for DOE spending to be closely scrutinized.
According to the audit only one-third of the DOE’s 278 state funded programs had adequate systems in place to monitor their effectiveness.
“There's no accountability, there's no transparency and they don't even know where all money is,” said Hemmings.
The DOE’s operating budget, excluding libraries, has grown from $881.4 million in 1998 to $2.5 billion in 2009.
One of the top democrats in the House, Finance Chairman Marcus Oshiro, is promising all state departments well get a top down review by lawmakers.
"They're gonna be taken to the rigors and each one has to justify all of their existing programs, expenditure plans and what kind of return on investment we get for our tax dollars.”
As of Monday fifteen democratic senators had signed a petition calling for a special session to address school furloughs. In the House that number stood at nineteen, with four republicans on board.
Rep. Finnegan, one of the GOP members who signed the petition in the House but will have her name removed, says that while she supports a special session she does not back any increase to the state’s general excise tax.
“If we were to increase the GET by another half percent, we don't hold accountable a system that is not operating efficiently,” she said.
Even if a special legislative session were to be called by a two-thirds majority in each chamber, passing even a half percent general excise tax increase will not be easy.
"I want to know what the lay of the land is,” said Oshiro. “I want to know what kind of services will be impacted next year. And I want to know frankly what people are willing to pay for.”
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