CTA's legislative advocates are working in the state Capitol to protect schools from shocks generated by California's energy crisis.
At the local level, schools are vulnerable to rapidly rising costs that threaten to rob money from instruction and salary accounts. Also, schools are subject to rolling power outages, leaving students and teachers without lights and heat during the instructional day.
At the state level, the ongoing energy crisis threatens to reduce state budget surplus funds that should go for other purposes, including school-related legislation.
In a matter of four weeks, California has spent more than $800 million of its estimated $10 billion surplus to secure short-term power, according to published reports. At that rate, much of the surplus could be exhausted in a matter of months.
While Gov. Gray Davis and lawmakers are wrestling with possible solutions to the overall challenge of securing affordable and abundant energy, CTA has been working specifically to protect schools from both outages and the fiscal fallout.
CTA and its Education Coalition partners have been alerting members of the Legislature's fiscal and budget committees that rising power rates - unless checked - will ultimately force schools to pare funds from classroom programs. Should rates rise quickly and far enough, the costs could begin to zero out the actual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) provided as part of the 2000-01 budget and the COLA proposed by Davis in his preliminary 2001-02 spending plan.
The coalition will be seeking additional funding or other provisions of law to hold schools generally "harmless" from the increases.
At the same time, CTA supports legislation that would place public schools on the list of vital services - such as hospitals and other medical providers - that should be exempted from rolling power blackouts.
Early last month, CTA's State Council of Education voted to back several specific measures that are among those lawmakers are introducing on schools' behalf.
Sen. Nell Soto (D-Pomona) has introduced a special session bill, SB 3X, that would mandate that the Public Utilities Commission require public schools and postsecondary educational institutions to have uninterruptible supplies of electricity.
A second proposal by Sen. Soto, SB 4X, would allow public schools, public and private postsecondary education institutions, and other vital services to cancel contracts that allow power companies to interrupt their electrical services in cases of severe shortages.
