Tennessee’s lieutenant governor took over a Department of Education news conference Tuesday and accused the Bredesen administration of misstating the Republican position on Pre-K.
Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey says an e-mail announcing the news conference by Education Commissioner Tim Webb was wrong.
“We have the commissioner of education and others of the Department of Education calling state senators short-sighted and reckless, simply because we want to leave the pre-K funding where it’s been since it was initiated in 2005, and that’s in a non-recurring basis.”
About a third of the money for Pre-K classes has come from lottery revenues, considered one-time funds. This year the governor wanted to shift paying for the program to the General Fund, to make sure the money would be available every year. But the Senate Finance Committee balked at the change.
Education commissioner Webb says the move will lead to the legislature cutting Pre-K next year, when the one-time funds run out.
Webb was shaken, but unconvinced, after a half-dozen Republican senators took over his press conference.
“They have every right to speak their…mind, but I think at the end of the day, the facts, speak, speak for themselves.”
Webb says the press conference was the first time the department had made a direct appeal to the public over a legislative action.
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Ramsey, the speaker of the Senate and the highest ranking Republican in state government, says he was upset of the wording of an e-mail sent out by the department.
“They said that there is an intent by Republican legislators in the state senate to cut Pre-K, yet you saw the commissioner stand up there and say, [in answer to the question] ‘Where do you get that intent?’ [the response] ‘Well, we don’t have any proof of that.’ Surely anybody with any rational mind would be upset about that: that when somebody can read our legislator’s mind, and say they have an intent, but yet they stand in a press conference and say, ‘Well we don’t have any basis to back that up.’”
Here’s the wording of the e-mail sent Tuesday:
NASHVILLE – State Commissioner of Education Dr. Timothy Webb and early-childhood education leaders from across Tennessee will hold a news conference today, June 16, at 1 p.m. CDT, to ask state lawmakers to reject Senate GOP efforts to diminish the Volunteer State’s nationally recognized pre-kindergarten program…..
On Friday, a budget amendment passed the Senate Finance Ways & Means Committee along a party-line vote that would strip $22 million in recurring funds from pre-K programs. The amendment instead would move the funding to a non-recurring or ‘one-time’ basis – signaling the GOP-led Senate’s intent to do away with the money in the next budget cycle.(italics added to show the sentence that Ramsey disagreed with)
Ramsey says he is unhappy with allegations that the Senate Republican Caucus is opposed to public schools. He changed subjects to the fight between Republicans and Democrats over charter schools.
“We’re trying right now to get charter schools, which give parents a choice, where to send their kids if they’re in a failing school. What could be more supportive of public schools than that?”
He says changing the funding for pre-K programs to one-time money is simply recognition that in the future, foreseeable funding can’t be guaranteed for the program.
“We have no intent on cutting pre-K from where it is right now.”
Commissioner Webb’s argument – before he was interrupted by the Republican senators – is that removing $22 million in funding from the program (which would happen not in the 2009-10 budget but the year after, in this scenario) would cut about a quarter of existing pre-K classrooms, about 250.
Webb says the state currently has 934 pre-K classrooms serving approximately 18,000 children.
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