Governor Bobby Jindal's Remarks at Louisiana Association of Business and Industry Meeting
Governor Bobby Jindal's Remarks at Louisiana Association of Business and Industry Meeting
The below are speech excerpts from Governor Bobby Jindal's remarks to LABI in Baton Rouge, regarding a look ahead to the next legislative session.
"I want to give you just a FEW examples of what we will pursue in the legislature this year.
The core of our legislative program since the very first day has been restoring confidence in our government and restoring strength to our economy.
We will keep moving forward so that Louisiana has an honest government and a welcoming business climate.
We will strengthen our economy. We will continue to revamp our workforce system. We will improve our education system and our health care system.
"We will not rest until every one of our state's sons and daughters all over the world can Believe in Louisiana again.
"First, we must build off of our successful workforce development reforms implemented last year. Great programs to train our workers are only useful if we prepare our kids to succeed in them. This means we have to help those students that dropout of high school each year.
"We have a strong accountability system, and we have made great strides in increasing expectations for students and preparing them for a postsecondary education; however, around only 65 percent of high school students graduated on-time in the 06-07 school year, and about 14 to 17,000 drop out of school each year.
"This figure is disturbing. This is an incredibly large number of our sons and daughters that do not see a future for them in school. We have got to turn this trend around.
"Almost 10,000 over-average-age middle school students opt out of high school and instead enroll into a pre-GED OPTIONS program each year Yet only six percent of them end up getting a GED. This is not acceptable.
"Next session, we will work to close these gaps in the system that too many of our children are slipping through by giving students multiple pathways to success and keeping them engaged in their education - which we all know is the ticket to their future.
"We will work to create more opportunities for students to connect coursework to careers, to take career and technical education courses, and to participate in meaningful work-study programs with real businesses and real industry personnel.
"Our initiatives will tie academic remediation and GED completion to workforce training opportunities so students complete their program with a useful skill that can directly help them get a job.
"I also want to announce here today that in Spring 2009, the Louisiana Department of Education, in partnership with business groups and other state agencies and organizations, will launch a pilot program for dropout prevention. Targeting 14 school districts scattered throughout the state, the program will focus on providing GED support and Work-Ready Certificates so that those who don't finish traditional high school will also have an opportunity to succeed.
"The pilot program will be funded with existing DOE and federal TANF funds. No new state general funds will be used.
"The 14 school districts selected to participate have been identified based on the number of at-risk students who are at reading levels where they can be remediated and trained, the workforce demands in their region, industry support for work-study opportunities, and the capacity for training in high-demand fields at nearby LCTCS institutions.
"The pilot program will consist of approximately 550 at-risk students and will allow us to determine how best to proceed in implementing long-term solutions to improve our education system and reverse the high trend of dropouts in our state. It will also help us to determine how to best deliver academic remediation and training, what policy changes we need to support a long-term plan, and what level of partnership with businesses and community organizations is possible.
"This pilot initiative cannot be successful without your strong support. Business and industry leaders will need to play a central role at the state level and on the ground, helping us to identify needed training for our state's workforce and partnering with schools to prevent children from dropping out.
"We need you to be active partners in this endeavor. We need you to provide paid internships, apprenticeships, and other work-study programs. We need you to work with community-based organizations to identify mentors and coaches for these children. We need your help. The success of this initiative depends on it, and I believe it is not an overstatement to say that the success of those many children who are currently at risk of dropping out of school also depends on your involvement.
"Second, next session, we will also pursue performance based funding for higher education. You all understand a fundamental truth in the world that is not always understood in government: People thrive when they are incentivized to perform. Incentives help provide direction, a sense of purpose, drive efficiency and produce results.
"During the last session, we passed a resolution calling for the Board of Regents to allocate at least 25 percent of their funding formula based on performance: which includes increased retention and graduation rates, programs that produce graduates in high-demand fields, and research investments that promote the state's economic development. We also passed a resolution calling for greater consideration of actual program costs at community and technical colleges for training programs that prepare our future workforce.
"The current funding formula incentivizes enrollment growth only and simply funds institutions at an amount believed to be comparable to their peers. There is little, if any, incentive for institutions to target resources toward academic programs that produce graduates in critical workforce shortage areas, or incentives for institutions to focus attention on research that will render the state more competitive in the global economy.
"For example, today, colleges don't receive additional incentives to prepare biomedical engineers, and have just as much incentive to prepare nail technicians as welders. There is also no funding incentive today for institutions to move students toward their expected graduation date on time.
"Additionally, today, there is not an effective mechanism within the funding formula that recognizes the true costs of operating various academic programs, such as recruiting high-caliber faculty or purchasing the equipment needed to operate successful technical, undergraduate and graduate programs. We all know that recruiting faculty for Ph.D. programs is more expensive than undergraduate programs, and that English courses are less expensive to teach than automotive technology courses.
"The current formula also lacks the funding incentives for institutions to generate external research funding in sectors identified as economic development priorities.
"The proposed performance-based formula will address these needs in our current formula and better fit our higher education institutions to the real business and industry needs in our communities.
"This new funding formula will:
o Better account for actual academic program costs
o Encourage institutions to increase retention and graduation rates
o Provide incentives for university research conducted in high-priority economic development areas
o Encourage institutions to produce graduates in high-demand fields in line with the state's occupational demand forecasts and
o Hold colleges and universities more responsible for adequately maintaining campus facilities and infrastructure.
"Through this new, performance-based funding formula, higher education institutions will be rewarded for offering programs that meet real workforce demands.
"Third, next session we will build on our work to protect our children from those predators that prey on them. If I am known for one thing when I leave office I want it to be this .that we made Louisiana the safest place in America to raise children.
"We will increase penalties for school employees who abuse or neglect special education students - including our deaf and blind students. We must take extra initiative to protect our children - especially when they are entrusted to the care of education professionals when their parents send them to school.
"I will support legislation to increase penalties and background checks to make sure predators stay away from our kids - especially in our schools.
"Next session, we will also work to take the next step in our involuntary civil commitment pilot program legislation passed last session. We will also work to impose additional penalties when sex offenders fail to submit to electronic monitoring as required by law.
"We will improve the safety of our child-care facilities by increasing penalties when a sex offender is on the premises and penalize childcare providers who knowingly employ sex offenders. We will also improve licensing procedures to include the ability to revoke or suspend licenses for certain alleged crimes, including the facility allowing a sexual offender to be present on the premises.
"We will protect our ballparks, cub scouts and other kid groups and teams by prohibiting a sex offender from volunteering to coach or participate in any way when activities include children.
"We will criminalize the hijacking of business or personal internet routers for the purpose of downloading, uploading or selling child pornography so these predators can be punished if they use wi-fi signals in public places such as coffee shops or libraries to commit these crimes. This will close a loophole in current law and give our law enforcement officers another tool to catch these predators.
"Fourth - and of course no surprise to you, we will continue to improve our health care system by working with the legislature to further the initiatives outlined in the Louisiana Health First Initiative, which is currently awaiting federal approval.
"The statistics today are clear. According to the 2006 United Health Foundation, Louisiana ranks DEAD LAST in the nation in our overall health care. We rank 48th in prevention of obesity; 49th in infant death rates, 48th in cancer fatalities, 49th in premature deaths.
"Rapidly rising health care costs in the public and private sectors are making health insurance less affordable for more and more individuals and families and placing higher burdens on taxpayers. These are national problems that are especially acute in Louisiana. A recent report noted that family health care premiums rose more than three times faster than the salaries for Louisiana workers from 2000 to 2007.
"Well over half a million people in Louisiana have no insurance at all. The state's spending on the Medicaid population and the uninsured has almost doubled in the past ten years and is expected to double again over the next ten years - yet it still cannot keep pace with medical inflation.
"We see studies like the Kaiser Family Foundation State Health Facts, which reported that our state had the 5th highest rate of hospital admissions in the country, the 9th highest rate of inpatient days, and the 8th highest rate of ER visits in 2006.
"Given the state's projected growth in health care spending and a projected decline in state government revenues, health care spending will consume more than 21 percent of discretionary state spending in 2011, more than double the percentage in 2004.
"The Louisiana Health First initiative outlines improvements in our health care system that factor in the serious fiscal circumstances we face today and make it clear that we cannot make these improvements wait another year. The initiative includes: Covering 100,000 additional Louisianians who are uninsured today; We must move away from an all-or-nothing one-size-fits-all system; We must move away from the ER to primary care.
"Under the initiative, the state will for the first time be able to hold our healthcare system accountable for outcomes in Medicaid. Right now, all we can do is pay over 50 million claims a year to over 30,000 providers. We get a bill and we pay it, with no assurance that the service was necessary, improved the patient's health, or was even safe.
"We will demonstrate that the widespread adoption of electronic health records can significantly improve the quality and efficiency of health care for our people. It includes efforts to modernize our health care safety net system to better care for the uninsured and be a model training institution for medical students and residents."
Source