State & Local Weekly News Wrap-Up

By Timothy Brett posted Apr 05,2012 08:36 AM

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MULTI-JURISDISDICTION

Don't tell school districts that the economy is picking up. Many are still too busy figuring out how they are going to teach their students with diminished resources. More than eight in 10 districts say they are inadequately funded, and more than half anticipate a decrease in state and local revenues for the coming school year, according to a recent survey from the American Association of School Administrators. Even in districts where state aid is stabilizing, local funding is shrinking or costs are rising faster than revenues. Many are only now feeling the effects of the housing bust as towns lower property assessments,which affects the property tax revenues that many schools depend on. Yet another year of cuts is prompting a greater share of districts to slash teachers, classes and more. Two-thirds of districts expect to eliminate positions in 2012-13, while one-quarter are looking at furloughs. Some 57% anticipate having to increase class size. More than 48% say they may have to eliminate or delay instruction improvements, such as updating textbooks, computers and science labs. Nearly three in 10 are considering canceling summer school. Education is still feeling pinch of state budget cuts

ILLINOIS

The state of Illinois and two regional governments in the Chicago area have joined forces to converge their open-data repositories in a centralized website giving people one place to access data from each jurisdiction, officials said. With the help of cloud service provider Socrata, the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, and Cook County have developed and launched the Metro Chicago Data Convergence Cloud as part of a transparency effort connecting data from each jurisdiction via a cloud-computing environment. Socrata and government officials -Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel - unveiled the effort last week, with officials lauding it as a way to break down barriers between previously siloed state and regional government data sets and provide better unified government services for Chicago area residents. Cloud Of Government Data Grows Over Chicago

MINNESOTA

One of Minnesota’s “Twin Cities” will soon be the first municipal user of the state’s new cloud-based email service. St. Paul, Minn., is transitioning its 3,300 city email inboxes to the state’s Microsoft Office 365 cloud platform. The project, which should be complete by early June, will give the city 24-hour technical support supplied by the state and a more reliable communications system. Andrea Casselton, director of St. Paul’s Office of Technology and Communications, said the project is “very close” to being done. Announced last August, St. Paul is the first Minnesota city to enter into an agreement with the state for shared email services. The city had to wait to start work until its new budget cycle began in January, but the process is moving along. St. Paul to Jump on Minnesota’s Email Cloud by June

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