A Leaner Year Is Proposed for Schools. Education Dept. hit hardest of all.

Although President Bush called in the State of the Union address for a major new commitment to improving math and science instruction, his budget for the coming year would cut the Education Department’s discretionary budget to $54.41 billion from $55.92 billion in the current fiscal year.

The loss would follow more than $624 million in cuts to the department’s budget last year. And of 141 programs across government that the administration is proposing to eliminate, 42 are in the Education Department, the largest concentration of programs that would disappear of any agency. Among them are vocational education and several programs totaling nearly $1 billion to improve the college prospects of disadvantaged students.

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/politics/07educ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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Bush proposes land sales to fund rural schools program

by ROD DANIEL – Ravalli Republic

A popular federal grant program that funds schools, roads and forest projects in Ravalli County is slated to continue under a proposal by the Bush administration to sell $800 million worth of national forest land to fund the program.

The Department of Agriculture announced Monday that the administration would extend the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act for five years with land sales offsetting the program’s cost, as part of its fiscal year 2007 budget.

Signed into law in 2000 by President Bill Clinton, the act was intended to replace revenues from dwindling timber harvests on federal lands historically shared with counties, and since then it has sent more than $1.5 billion mostly to counties and states in the West. In Ravalli County, most of the money generated by the law has funded county roads and schools, but a smaller portion has funded the Resource Advisory Committee.

Full Story: http://www.ravallirepublic.com/articles/2006/02/07/news/news02.txt