AVAILABLE FUNDS — Lawmakers could return to Charleston in May for a special session to reinstate items cut from the fiscal year 2025 budget. — file photo
CHARLESTON — After West Virginia secured a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education for $465 million in additional spending on education programs, Gov. Jim Justice said Tuesday that lawmakers will be redirecting funds cut from the budget. He said we need to focus on recovery. invoice.
Last week, the governor's office accused the Department of Education of failing to comply with rules set to keep the state's education spending at a certain level in exchange for spending more than $1.1 billion on COVID-19 relief efforts. He announced that he had accepted the exemption for the second year in a row. funds.
“I can now say with certainty that I am excited to share that the U.S. Department of Education has accepted our request for a clawback waiver, meaning we will not have to return any federal funds,” he said Tuesday. The judge said this at the weekly administration briefing. From the National Diet Building. “We've done our job…and we've done it in a way that the federal government is happy with what we've done in terms of education. We've been supporting our kids, right?”
The state received more than $1.1 billion from 2020 to 2021 through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act. These funds were donated to school systems in all 55 counties.
The final rules established by states to remain eligible to spend CRRSA and ARPA funds will require final guidance to be released in August 2022, allowing states to compare their total education spending to their total budgeted spending by a certain average. was required to be maintained. This percentage is based on the average of three fiscal years (2017, 2018, and 2019) before the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020.
West Virginia's baseline proportional education spending level was 41.6%. However, because each county's education spending was tied to the school aid system, state support for K-12 education in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 fell below required spending levels. State officials were able to demonstrate increased education spending through other means, including teacher pay increases, increased funding for School Construction Authority projects, deferred maintenance of existing schools, and the Governor's School Communities Program.
However, the Department of Justice and state education and revenue officials have never publicly announced which waivers were initially approved and which have yet to be approved, and news of the second waiver application was announced only after it was announced. This was two weeks before the end of the Congress in 2024. It was revealed that the budget proposal for fiscal year 2025, which begins in July, is being worked on by the House Finance Committee and is smaller than the governor's proposed budget.
The House and Senate passed the budget, suspending the diversion of anticipated surpluses until the state receives approval for a second waiver. Senate Budget 200 sets the General Fund budget at $4.996 billion for next year and makes several cuts, including to Medicaid and the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Waiver Program.
Despite signing the bill, the justices were vocal about their dissatisfaction with how Congress watered down the budget and accused lawmakers of panicking over the exemption issue.
“I think we should always be careful, always be careful about the store, always be careful about our belongings, but if you run through a movie theater screaming, 'Fire,' that's the smart thing to do.” It makes no sense to think that way,” Justice said. “We covered this. We were confident it was covered and there was no reason to do so.”
The Justice Department will call lawmakers into a special session in May after the primary election, and will restore spending cuts in the budget surplus and make cuts to Medicaid and IDD waiver programs in time for the May midterm session of Congress. It is expected that the aim will be to restore the
“What we need to focus our efforts on from the get-go is to put the money we took out of the budget back into (the Department of Health and Human Services),” Justice said. “If we're not careful, we're going to really disrupt people who are really in need.”
