Collected posts from Blogs at the University of Central Oklahoma
Gov. Kevin Stitt was not kidding when he told state lawmakers in December not to be quick to divvy up the $612 million in new revenue then projected for Fiscal Year 2020.
On Monday, Stitt proposed an FY 2020 budget that holds most agencies’ appropriations flat and puts $382.6 million into what amounts to savings…
Gov. Kevin Stitt’s first week in office was largely focused on drafting the executive budget he will present to lawmakers next month, which is expected to use growing state tax collections for another teacher pay raise and to increase the state’s rainy day fund.
Lawmakers expect an additional $612 million in available funding next fiscal . . .
Preliminary revenue numbers presented to the state’s top elected officials last week show the Legislature will have more money to spend next year than it is spending this year.
That’s great.
It means the Oklahoma economy is growing, the tax increases passed earlier this year to fund teacher pay increases are covering the needed costs and there . . .
Just hours after state leaders learned there may be millions more to spend next year, newly elected Gov. Kevin Stitt had a blunt warning for the Republican-controlled Legislature.
In all, lawmakers learned Wednesday they could have $612.4 million — or 8 percent — more to spend when they sit down to hash out the upcoming state budget….
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Gov. Kevin Stitt and a top legislative leader are indicating that the state is ready to reinvest in its higher education system. Good.
Rep. Kevin Wallace, chairman of the House Appropriations and Budgets Committee, told state regents last week that when the state’s budget for fiscal year 2020 is rolled out, he expects a $28 million increase in funding . . .
Oklahoma’s public colleges and universities will be prohibited from creating “free-speech zones” under a new law.
A bill Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law Monday essentially doubles down on free speech rights already guaranteed to college students under the First Amendment…
After a decade of cuts to higher education funding, all signs from the state Capitol appear that an increase in funding could be on the way, though not as much as state regents had hoped for.
Speaking this week at a meeting of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, Rep. Kevin Wallace, who is chairman of the Appropriations and Budgets Committee, . . .
In December 2017, a task force that studied the future of higher education in Oklahoma voted to give the governing boards of seven schools until June 30, 2019, to merge with larger governing boards. As the deadline nears, the number of mergers stands at zero.
This isn’t terribly surprising. These schools have been governed the same way for a long . . .
Members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives exercised their First Amendment rights for 75 minutes Monday afternoon before passing a measure that opposing protagonists argued may or may not encourage free speech on college campuses.
Senate Bill 361, by Sen. Julie Daniels, R-Bartlesville, would prohibit the state’s public colleges and universities . . .
In 11 states, higher-education appropriations have not recovered at all from the worst years of the Great Recession, according to an annual report released on Tuesday by the association of State Higher Education Executive Officers.
Nationally, said the 2018 “State . . .