California State Lottery. Allocation for Instructional Materials. Legislative Initiative Amendment.
	Rebuttal to Argument Against Proposition 20

Arguments on this page are the opinions of the authors and have not been checked for accuracy by any official agency.

A YES vote for Proposition 20 will set aside money for textbooks and instructional materials without reducing the amount of lottery money the schools currently receive. It will only affect any GROWTH in lottery revenues for education.

A YES vote for Proposition 20 will allow schools to continue to fund everything that they fund now and more. They maintain LOCAL CONTROL.

Proposition 20 would only take HALF OF ANY GROWTH in the lottery revenues and RESERVE it for textbooks and instructional materials.

For example, the 1997-1998 fiscal year revenues were about $822 million. The 1998-1999 fiscal year revenues grew by $113 million. Proposition 20 would only reserve half of the growth, $56.5 MILLION, for textbooks and allow the schools to spend the remaining $878.5 MILLION as they wish.

We agree that school safety and security are important; the majority of the lottery money will continue to be available for these purposes. But, in educating children, textbooks are ranked second in importance only to teachers. Yet, California's ranking for per pupil textbook spending is at the bottom nationally--47th out of 50 states.

There remains a major shortage of textbooks statewide, and a continuous need to replace them. Setting aside some lottery revenues for textbooks is essential to enable children to meet the new high education standards and to obtain a quality education.

A YES vote on Proposition 20, the Cardenas Textbook Act, will provide LONG-TERM funding without increasing taxes.

MANNY HERNANDEZ
Trustee, Sacramento City Unified School District

JUDITH COCHRANE
Teacher

CAROL S. HORN
Parent

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