This week at the Capitol, the House Early Childhood Committee released their omnibus bill. It was unveiled on Monday, testimony was taken Tuesday, and it was amended and voted out on Thursday. It includes the following provisions:
- A one time cut of $7.5 million, accomplished by capturing the underspending in Basic Sliding Fee child care;
- Re-purposing $500,000 of existing quality dollars at DHS for providers to use to get ready for a quality rating system;
- Ensuring parents who receive child care assistance, and are under the age of 21 and in high school or pursuing a GED are eligible for CCAP for the full school year. This was a recommendation of the CCAP Simplification Task Force;
- Several new duties were added to the Governor’s Early Childhood Advisory Council, including adding a representative of the Dept of Health, requiring the Council to make recommendations on screening and assessments, requiring the Council to create and implement school readiness report card, and creating a task force to develop recommendations by January 2011 for the creation of an Office of Early Learning;
- Requiring that charter schools that provide early childhood screening must inform families that apply to the charter school about the availability of the program;
- Clarifying who is eligible to participate in School Readiness programs.
The bill passed out of the committee and was re-referred to the full House Finance Committee, where it will be divided and the child care portions will be amended onto the Omnibus Health and Human Services bill, and the education provisions will be amended onto the Omnibus Education bill. We expect this to happen in the next couple weeks, after legislators return from Spring Break. The full bill can be read here.
The Senate has yet to release their Education and Human Services Budget.
Read our full mid-session report, which aligns Ready 4 K’s policy agenda with corresponding legislation.
Our bill tracker may also be a useful resource for you, and it has been updated to reflect action on the House Omnibus Early Childhood Bill. However, once we have omnibus bills from the Senate, we will no longer update the tracker and will focus our attention on tracking the omnibus bills and conference committee activity.
In federal news, the Health Care Reform Package that passed Congress this week includes $1.5 billion over five years for a new grant program for evidence-based home visiting services. Within the next six months, states will have to conduct a needs assessment, develop three-to-five year outcome benchmarks to measure improvements, and to choose program models that meet certain criteria as evidence-based models. The first $100 million in federal funds will be distributed before the end of the current federal fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2010. The Minnesota Department of Health has announced that it will be taking the lead in collaboration with the Departments of Human Services and Education to do the planning that will be required for Minnesota to prepare a grant application. There is still much to learn much about what will be required from states, and through our continual involvement with the Minnesota Coalition for Targeted Home Visiting, we will stay abreast of news and share what we learn with you.
Over the weekend, it is expected that the conference committee on the first budget balancing bill, which includes essentially everything except health & human services and education, will complete their work and each body will take up the bill on Monday, March 29.
The Legislature goes on a week-long break starting at the end of the day on Monday, March 29, returning Tuesday, April 6. So what does this mean? Your legislator will be back in their district for a full week, and should be expecting to hear from you, their constituents. So take a moment to call, write or find your legislator at the local café and tell them how important it is to hold early care and education harmless.
Have a good break, and we’ll see you next month!
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