SCSC: SOCRATES: Legislation

Listed below are 2006 Legislative Session documents and a complete set of 2005, 2004, and 2003 Legislative Session documents related to the request for E–12 education and public library telecommunications and Internet access services funding. Please feel free to distribute these items to anyone that you think should know about this request, including Legislators, Legislative staff, persons who are affected by a lack of funding for telecommunications and Internet access services (teachers, students, library users, school and public library administrators, etc.), and anyone else that you identify. Your help is needed to publicize this request and to ask for support for this funding proposal.

We all know that the State of Minnesota has a major problem with its current and future budgets. However, we also know that telecommunications and Internet access services are a service efficient and cost effective way to deal with problems now facing schools and public libraries, including lack of funding to employ sufficient staff, to purchase instructional and library resources, to update and provide the scope of curriculum needed by students, to give the citizens of Minnesota access in schools and public libraries to the Internet and its wealth of information, research, and reference resources, to provide community education for economic development, and for mandated reporting and funds distribution by the state and federal government, as well as numerous other examples. We will hear from various persons that no such funding is possible, that the Governor will not accept the provision of funding, and various other reasons about why this request will have no results. However, we will never know the truth of these statements unless we try to obtain funding. The Governor talks about electronic services as a means to curtail continuing costs; the MN Department of Education Commissioner talks about distance education as a solution for some education shortcomings in Minnesota; and numerous Legislators have responded favorably to supporting a funding request. This legislative request is worth some time and effort!

2006 Legislative Documents