Freshman Senator, Aaron Osmond, chairs the powerful Senate Education Committee this year. He got permission to hold one last committee meeting four days before the end of the session so two of his bills and two sponsored by others could get the stamp of approval of a last minute committee hearing. This despite the fact that we all know that rush decisions with little discussion are often poor decisions. Senator Osmond assured me before the meeting started that there had been lots of behind the scenes discussion before these bills were brought to this public committee meeting.
Sen. Osmond's SB216 would require the State Board of Education to spend $450,000 of Education Fund money to contract for online tools, hardware, software, training resources, and incident management processes to provide greater security for secondary schools. Former Utah First Lady, Jackie Leavitt, testified in favor of the bill.
I argued in committee that districts could better use that money to improve security in the way that is best for their district. I also said that last minute bills targeted at a specific service provided by a specific vendor were not in our best interest.
SB217, also sponsored by Sen. Osmond, would spend an as yet unknown amount of money for a group of BYU professors and secondary school math teachers to quickly create on-line math textbooks to be used to teach math that meets the new Utah Core math standards. It would create textbook information which would belong to the state and would be far less expensive than paper textbooks currently available.
Although I did not testify against the bill I am still concerned about a last minute vendor bill passing in an early morning special committee meeting.
Senator Jerry Stevenson, representing Davis County, sponsored SB248. It would spend $6 million of state economic development funds over 3 years to provide grants to 10 schools. An education technology vendor would then provide these schools with an integrated school-wide technology plan. This plan would include a mobile learning device for each student, computers for classrooms, and a wireless network with internet filtering.
I testified that educators would be happy to receive $6 million from other than an education fund, but that districts like Davis already have schools where every student has a netbook as their textbook. Implementing these things locally is a better way to innovate than top-down direction.
Finally, I was troubled that Sen. Niederhauser brought his bill, SB174, to the Education Committee at this late date when this committee has no background knowledge of land use issues. His bill would allow subdivision of large agricultural land parcels without producing a plat map.
I told the committee that this kind of last minute work did not lend itself to good decision making.
At the end of the day, this wheeling and dealing ended with all four bills passing the committee unanimously.
