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Transcript Prepared By the Clerk of the Legislature Transcriber's Office Education Committee February 07, 2017 [LB554 LB595 LB645] The Committee on Education met at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 7, 2017, in Room 1525 of the State Capitol, Lincoln, Nebraska, for the purpose of conducting a public hearing on LB554, LB645, and LB595. Senators present: Mike Groene, Chairperson; Rick Kolowski, Vice Chairperson; Laura Ebke; Steve Erdman; Lou Ann Linehan; Adam Morfeld; Patty Pansing Brooks; and Lynne Walz. Senators absent: None. SENATOR GROENE: Welcome to the Education Committee public hearing. My name is Mike Groene from Legislative District 42. I serve as Chair of the committee. Committee will take up the bills in the order posted outside the entrances. Our hearing today is your public part of the legislative process. We are blessed in Nebraska that the people are the second house. Nowhere else can you testify as you can here face to face with your elected officials. Please turn off cell phones and other electronic devices. Move to the chairs at the front, if there's openings, of the room when you are ready to testify. The order of testimony is the introducer, proponents, opponents, neutral, and closing remarks by the introducer. If you will be testifying, please complete the green sheet form and hand it to the committee clerk when you come up to testify. They are in the corners, the green sheets are. If you have written material that you would like distributed to the committee, please hand them in to the pages to distribute. We need 12 copies for all committee members and staff. If you need additional copies, please ask a page to make copies for you. When you begin to testify, please state and spell your name. That's very important because everything is being recorded here and the transcribers then know how to spell your name correctly. We'll use the light system: four minutes, green, will be on green; yellow for one minute; a total of five minutes. When it's red please wrap up your testimony. You may be asked questions by the committee members so stay in your chair to see if you have questions. Please speak directly into the microphone so our transcribers are able to hear your testimony clearly. The committee members with us today will introduce themselves beginning at my far right. SENATOR LINEHAN: Good afternoon. I'm Lou Ann Linehan from District 39, which is western Douglas County. SENATOR GROENE: Senator Pansing Brooks will probably be joining us, I haven't heard anything otherwise; the same with Senator Morfeld. SENATOR KOLOWSKI: I'm Senator Rick Kolowski, District 31, southwest Omaha. SENATOR EBKE: Laura Ebke, District 32, Jefferson, Thayer, Saline, and Fillmore Counties, and a southwest corner of Lancaster County. 1 Transcript Prepared By the Clerk of the Legislature Transcriber's Office Education Committee February 07, 2017 SENATOR ERDMAN: Steve Erdman, District 47. My district is about 80 percent of the Nebraska Panhandle. SENATOR WALZ: I'm Lynne Walz, District 15, which is all of Dodge County. SENATOR GROENE: Thank you. I'd like to introduce the committee staff. To my left is Committee Counsel Charles Garman; to my far right is Committee Clerk Kristina McGovern. And today helping us, the pages are Alexi Richmond and Sam Baird. They're both UNL students. Please remember that senators may come and go during our hearing as they may have bills to introduce in other committees. I'd also like to remind our committee members to speak directly into the microphones. Lastly, we are an electronically equipped committee and information is provided electronically. You may see committee members looking at their phones or at devices. Normally, it's because they're seeking information for questions with their staff back in their offices, so bear with us. And we will start with Senator Smith's introduction of his LB554. [LB554] SENATOR SMITH: Good afternoon, Chairman Groene and members of the Education Committee. For the record, my name is Jim Smith, J-i-m S-m-i-t-h, and I represent the 14th Legislative District in Sarpy County. I'm here today to introduce LB554. Earlier this year I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend an Excel in Education Convention in D.C. and was inspired by the group's mission to maximize every child's ability to achieve his or her potential. I began to think of what I could do as a legislator here in Nebraska to advance policy that would help in making our education system one of the best in the nation. I already think Nebraska is fortunate to have a very strong education system, but there is always room for improvement. I was then introduced to a group called America Succeeds. This Denver-based group consists of nonpartisan business-led policy organizations that advocate for the business sector to take an active role in improving our schools. Businesses fuel our economy and today's students will be the backbone of our future businesses. The long-term success of our country and our state relies directly on strong educational outcomes. America Succeeds issued a report called "Pulling Back the Curtain," which examines an educational financial transparency law that passed in Colorado with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Governor John Hickenlooper in 2014. This transparency law requires reporting of school funding at an unprecedented level that finally allows teachers, parents, and taxpayers to see the return on their investment in education. The law requires school districts to report financial and human resource information to the state in an improved manner that allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of schools within a district and among districts. So why is it important and how does the transparency improve educational outcomes? Again, it gives us the ability to see firsthand how our tax dollars are being spent. This allows us to not only identify inefficiencies but also uncovers possible funding inequities between affluent and high-poverty schools, and shines a light on those programs that are working and where additional government spending should be directed to help our children. As written, 2 Transcript Prepared By the Clerk of the Legislature Transcriber's Office Education Committee February 07, 2017 LB554 would require the State Board of Education to contract for the creation of a Web site that translates the expenditures for major categories of expenditures for schools, school districts, and educational service units in a format that is readable by a layperson. I'm going to repeat that last part, that is readable by a layperson, because that's the key to this piece of legislation. I know that schools are already required to report a wealth of information to the state and that all these figures are available on the Department of Education's Web site. But it is how these figures are made available and to what level is the discussion I want LB554 to stimulate. While the Web site does allow for some comparisons, in general, I was unable to easily find anything that provided information allowing me to compare one school building to another school building, for example. Most of what I found was either district-specific, a district's total expenditure on transportation, for example; or when comparing individual schools I could only uncover a general snapshot of a school's student population. If the information I was looking for was on the Web site, I wasn't able to locate it. I want LB554 to be the beginning of a discussion about how do we take the information we have and make it readily available and easy to understand by everybody, not just educators and policymakers but by the general population. If the members of this committee have not yet visited Omaha Public Schools' Open Book initiative, I would highly recommend it. I've had several conversations with Senator Justin Wayne and I believe it is during his leadership time on the OPS Board that they introduced that Open Book concept. The Open Book initiative aims to make the district more accountable to the taxpayers by increasing the transparency, accessibility, and clarity of OPS's budget information. The Web site is easy to navigate, easy to understand, and it is easy to make building comparisons. So again, I applaud OPS for what they've done with making that information transparent to their teachers, to their...to the parents, and to the public. The goal of having this information available to the general public encourages schools to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars and to increase efficiencies and accountability. The Open Book initiative should be a model for the state in reporting and delivering education finance information. I understand, to do this, the way information is collected and reported by districts would have to change. We'd have to drill down to the school level and break out information by categories that are the same throughout the state. However, if our largest school district in Nebraska is able to deliver this today, I think the entire state should be able to be up to and embrace this challenge. I realize that LB554, as drafted, would not necessarily accomplish all of this. But as I said, I think it's a great starting place to begin this discussion on how to make school finance transparent throughout the state and, again, understandable by a layperson. That's the best way for this information to be of use, to allow the investors in the state's education system to evaluate their investment and to identify areas where further investment will help our children succeed and lead our state into a prosperous future.

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