Joint education committees pass workforce-development bill with amendments after discussion on Perkins funding

The joint committees on higher and lower education voted to pass Senate Bill 1585 SD1 with amendments after hearing detailed testimony about how the measure would use federal Career and Technical Education (Perkins) funds to align school programs with workforce needs.

The bill drew sustained discussion because it would condition or direct how a portion of federal Perkins funding is used by P-20 and by local education partners. The Department of Education, the Attorney General’s office and Hawaii P-20 all testified, noting both the bill’s intent and practical limits tied to federal grant rules.

“Federal funds cannot lapse to the general fund, but have to be returned to the federal government,” Deputy Attorney General Candace Park told the committee, underscoring legal limits on reallocating federal grant money.

Stephen Schatz, executive director of Hawaii P-20 and state director of career and technical education, said the state receives about $7,000,000 annually through the Perkins Act and that P-20 is largely a fiscal pass-through for those monies. “We receive about $7,000,000 through the Perkins Act. We split that roughly 50–50 between the Community College System and Hawaii high schools,” Schatz said, adding that Perkins funds are principally for educational programming and come with federal reporting requirements.

Troy Swayoka, educational specialist for CTE at the Department of Education, described how DOE expanded its identified CTE pathways from six to 13 in recent years based on state labor-market data and industry advisory councils. The committee asked whether the bill’s proposed performance or workforce-alignment requirements could be measured with current data systems; P-20 and DOE warned that several proposed workforce outcome metrics are not currently measurable because DOE does not collect the identifiers needed to match students to labor-market records.

P-20 described a plan to use a portion of reserved Perkins funds for competitive subawards that would require local partnerships (for example, high school–community college teams) to demonstrate alignment with statewide workforce needs in health care, IT, skilled trades and teaching. Committee members pressed whether conditioning federal funds in this way is legally permissible; P-20 and the Attorney General’s office said the idea is unusual and would require careful legal review.

Committee members also asked about the portion of Perkins funds that may be set aside for statewide initiatives. Witnesses described the reserved share as the portion that “can be kept aside for statewide initiatives” (discussed in the hearing as roughly 15 percent of the allocation), not an administrative fee.

After discussion, a member asked to confer with the bill’s author and continue the conversation; the chair’s recommendation to pass with amendments was adopted by both the lower- and higher-education panels.

Next steps: the measure passed with amendments and a committee recommendation that included a deferred effective date cited in committee action. Committee leaders said they would continue to work with P-20, DOE and the Attorney General’s office to resolve questions about permissible uses of Perkins funds and measurable outcome metrics.