Ron Lankford of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 112310Lankford.wmv

Meeting held at the state capitol Nov. 22-23 with the Missouri House Interim Budget Transparency Committee and administrators from the departments of elementary and secondary education and higher education.

Lankford's Excerpt:

Everyone's aware of the difficulty of budgeting this year. We understand that and it's no one's fault that the General Assembly is going to have to wrestle with some tough issues. But if we cut everything from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in the scope of dealing with the budgetary crisis in the state of Missouri, it's not going to take of that... We're talking $1.6 million of general revenue is what goes through for administrative purposes in the department...The large expenditure we have for operations and beyond that comes from federal dollars. The department of elementary and secondary education really is the conduit and we don't get to make discretionary determinations about the appropriations of those monies.

All the general revenue we have as far as foundation form and categoricals, those are proscriptive as far as the formula is concerned. And then the federal dollars we administer, there's a process. What we do is a lot of compliance and program improvement. In answer to your question are we going to ask for as much? We'd like $1.6 million. Realistically I've heard the commissioner said we could expect a cut to that amount.

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• Ron Lankford
• budget
• budget cuts
• budget transparency