The chairwoman of a Senate budget subcommittee has tweaked he earlier plan for keeping the Early Head Start program in the state budget.
Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, on Friday proposed adding $1.7 million to an earlier proposal to restore $8.5 million of the program’s $11.3 million budget.
Gov. Sam Brownback last month proposed dropping the program from the state budget, saying it hadn’t done enough to raise the state’s fourth-grade reading levels.
Instead, he proposed starting Reading Roadmap, a $6 million initiative aimed at improving reading proficiency in poor-performing school districts.
McGinn, chair of both the Senate Ways and Means Committee and its subcommittee on social services, had already proposed putting $5 million of the $6 million for Reading Roadmap back into Early Head Start.
On Friday, she proposed cutting SRS administrative salaries by $750,000, the department’s adoption subsidy program by $1 million. In turn, the savings would add $1.75 million to the Early Head Start, pushing the overall restoration effort to $10.2 million.
McGinn said she had assured the Governor’s Office that she was not opposed to Reading Roadmap.
“It’s just that it’s a program that’s not been implemented yet,” she said.
In earlier deliberations, subcommittee members questioned the merits of eliminating a well-established program for one they knew little about.
McGinn’s plan leaves $1 million in the budget for developing a plan for Reading Roadmap.
The subcommittee voted to recommend McGinn’s amended plan to the full budget committee.
“We’re still $1.1 million short of where we started, but we’re way ahead of what the governor proposed,” said Mary Baskett, executive director at the Kansas Head Start Association.
McGinn’s plan also calls for using foster-care funds and a managed care program’s projected savings to restore the proposed elimination of a $10.2 million grant program that community mental health centers use to underwrite services for the uninsured. It also would restore Family Centered System of Care, a $3.2 million support program for families with mentally ill children.