A bill for an act relating to state finances, including by making, modifying, limiting, or reducing appropriations, distributions, or transfers, authorizing expenditure of certain unappropriated moneys, making corrections, and including effective date, applicability, and retroactive applicability provisions.(See HF 729.)
Representatives,I am Dave Daughton ad I represent the School Administrators of Iowa and the Rural School Advocates of Iowa. Our concerns with HSB 252 are primarily with the budget reductions to the Area Education Agencies(AEAs). The AEAs provide services to students all over the state with the majority of their efforts with special needs students. They work with all students/districts but their services are most needed in rural areas. Individuals from the AEAs go into school districts and work with students and staff to provide the services needed for their IEPs.AEAs are struggling like all others to hire and retain staff to provide the services and need the financial resources to be able to compete for staff. This cut in funding will hinder those efforts, which will result in additional challenges to provide services to students. In addition, we feel that the passage of the ESA bill will create additional challenges in providing services for students, as there will likely be additional students being served in nonpublic schools. This will create at the very least, logistical challenges for providers, in time and travel to districts.From a school district point of view, the cut in funding for AEAs could mean a reduction of services for special needs students, as the AEAs will not have appropriate staffing levels to serve those needs.Thank you for your consideration.
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