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Hawaii Board of Education members spent hours Tuesday grilling Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi and Chief Financial Officer Amy Kunz over the district’s proposed operating budget for the next two years.

The board ultimately approved the Department of Education‘s request, deciding to let the Legislature and executive branch sort out a couple key areas of concern — in particular, $4 million to create a student assessment test in Hawaiian and almost $1 million to restore athletics programs to 2008 levels.

Board members told department officials that going forward they expect more detailed breakdowns of the budget requests, better rationales for the proposed expenditures and more time to consider everything before voting on it.

Board Chair Don Horner wanted to know why the district wants $40.5 million for fiscal year 2014 and $35.6 million for the following year in extra general fund money despite Gov. Neil Abercrombie‘s administration telling the department to hold the line.

“They told us to submit a flat budget. And what you’re asking this board to do is override that by $75 million,” he said. “I think you need to be crystal clear that’s what you’re asking. That was not clear in your presentation, at least to me.”

To maintain current services, the department would need $1.39 billion from the state general fund. Instead, the district wants $1.43 billion for FY14 and $1.42 billion for FY15.

However, Kunz said the department will almost completely offset the requested increase from the state general fund by leveraging federal money and reallocating current resources.

So in looking at the overall education budget, the district’s total requested appropriation for FY14 is $12.2 million over the $1.7 billion ceiling set by the Hawaii Budget and Finance Office. And for FY15, the district is $7.8 million over for the cap.

Before passing the operating budget on to the full board for its approval, two board members on the Finance and Infrastructure Committee — Nancy Budd and Horner — said they were voting with reservations.

Horner had serious concerns over the department’s request for $4 million to develop a federally accepted assessment test in Hawaiian for the state’s 600 students who attend immersion schools.

He pointed at a past effort to do the same, noting the waste of money when the U.S. Department of Education rejected it. The chair said there were no guarantees this new test would be accepted, and questioned spending so much money for something that benefits so few students.

Matayoshi defended the request, trading barbs with Horner about what the state constitution says and whether the test is needed. She said this is a different assessment with new standards that must be done.

Board member Jim Williams helped clarify how the district arrived at this point. He said the state years ago approved the Native Hawaiian immersion schools program, and that program is driving the need to create the test in Hawaiian.

Budd had concerns over the hundreds of thousands of dollars in line items specifically for athletics programs. She said it is hard to approve increases in funding for sports after cutting arts programs and money for other extracurricular activities.

New Laptops for Students

The district tackled this budget differently than years past. Instead of a goal-oriented approach, Kunz said the department went one step further to budgeting toward the strategies to achieve those goals.

This approach — which follows the department’s strategic vision and Abercrombie’s to invest in education to rebuild the state’s economy — led to the need to reallocate resources and request additional general fund money.

For example, the district wants to spend more than $14 million next fiscal year and about $22 million the following year to buy laptops and tablets for students. This would be a phased-in approach starting with five volunteer complex areas the first year, then five more the second year.

The rationale behind the decision is that since the are so new, the district doesn’t want to spend millions of dollars on first-edition textbooks that could become obsolete in a year. Instead, school officials said they can get more bang for their buck by pursuing e-edition versions and also use those computers for testing and other education purposes.

The department’s budget also requests:

• A $12.8 million increase in funding to handle the expected rise in enrollment next year from 172,927 to 175,868 students.

• An extra $16 million over the next two years to maintain the current level of student transportation services. This number assumes a $2.2 million savings each year due to cost efficiencies achieved from the recommendations in a consultant’s report that’s due next month.

• $5 million more over the biennium for teacher recruitment and retention, such as bonuses.

There’s still months to go in the budget process. Abercrombie’s administration isn’t expected to present the overall state budget to the Legislature until December, and lawmakers won’t finalize it until late next spring.

Here’s the department’s written recommendation to the board: