The Senate Committee overseeing education policy received a broad update on the Kirwan Commission recommendations – and a sense that the plan is still evolving.

The Senate Committee on Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs held a briefing on January 14 with Dr. William “Brit” Kirwan, chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, and the Commission’s lead staffer, DLS’s Rachel Hise. The briefing covered the full range of its recommendations.

Watch the full briefing online.

Among the noteworthy observations during the afternoon event was Ms. Hise, noting that the implementing legislation is still not yet available, and some of the underlying information (most notably enrollment estimates) is still shifting:

The formula figures that the Commission arrived at… the inputs, the per-pupil amounts, will not change…but based on the most recent enrollment and local wealth, which we will be receiving as part of the Governor’s budget submission tomorrow… the funding amounts will change, in both the upcoming year and all the way out to 2030.

So, the staff are busy working on updating the figures, as we speak, so that we can have the right set of numbers, that we will be working with for the rest of session.

I caution getting too wed to any figure that you see… that say your county will get a certain amount of money or will need to come up with a certain amount of money, because those numbers are all going to change. I apologize, but that’s just the way it works.

-Rachel Hise, Department of Legislative Services

(the quotes segment starts around 1:55 on the online video feed)