BILL NUMBER: AB 719INTRODUCED BILL TEXT INTRODUCED BY Assembly Members Block and Lara (Coauthor: Assembly Member Fletcher) (Coauthors: Senators Padilla and Vargas) FEBRUARY 17, 2011 An act relating to special education. LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST AB 719, as introduced, Block. Special education: funding. Existing law requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction to make prescribed computations each fiscal year to determine the amount of funding to be apportioned to each special education local plan area. This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would update the severity service multiplier that will be used in the special disabilities adjustment formula and that this change use data from the special education incidence study results that the State Department of Education will submit to the Legislature on or before April 1, 2011. Vote: majority. Appropriation: no. Fiscal committee: no. State-mandated local program: no. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS: SECTION 1. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (a) Since the establishment of the Poochigian and Davis Special Education Reform Act (Ch. 854, Stats. 1997 (A.B. 602), which changed California's special education funding structure from a resource-based to a primarily census-based approach, the state has always set aside sufficient funds to account for differing incidences of pupils with severe disabilities across special education local plan areas. (b) The Legislature continues to recognize the importance of distributing special education funding with a formula that takes into account the differing incidences of severe disabilities. For this reason, it has been, and remains, the intent of the Legislature to provide a severity service concentration factor to each special education local plan area in order to mitigate the extraordinary costs for schools with particularly high concentrations of pupils with severe and high cost disabilities. (c) The Legislature is committed to ensuring that the severity service concentration factor is based on sound data. To this end, it is the intent of the Legislature that the severity service concentration factor for each special education local plan area be updated using data from the special education incidence study results that the State Department of Education will submit to the Legislature on or before April 1, 2011. SEC. 2. It is the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would update the severity service multiplier that will be used in the special disabilities adjustment formula starting on July 1, 2011. It is further the intent of the Legislature that this change use data from the special education incidence study results that the State Department of Education will submit to the Legislature on or before April 1, 2011.