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Scholarships and grants program asks for educator‑incentive funding and a software‑engineer position
Summary
Office of the State Board of Education staff and Legislative Services presented the Scholarships and Grants program budget, which administers multiple state scholarship programs including the Opportunity Scholarship and a rural/underserved educator incentive. The program reported 1.35 FTP and requested $1.375 million to fund the rural and
Kevin Campbell, budget and policy analyst with the Legislative Services Office, summarized the Scholarships and Grants program budget and told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee the program is largely trustee and benefit payments: roughly 99.5% of spending pays scholarships and grants; personnel costs are a small share of the program’s budget.
Office of the State Board of Education Executive Director Josh Whitworth said the program administers five scholarship and grant programs, including the Opportunity Scholarship and the Bridger (rural) and Underserved Educator Incentive program. The legislature provided $7 million for the Opportunity Scholarship in FY2021 and built subsequent educator-incentive funding in FY2023 and FY2024.
Requests and staffing: Scholarships and Grants requested $1,375,000 in FY2026 funding for the Bridger and Underserved Educator Incentive program and requested an additional $124,000 and a software engineer position to maintain scholarship application and public‑facing databases. Whitworth said some customer‑service and IT functions are supported from other State Board budgets but that a backlog of maintenance and security work on application systems exists and the program needs dedicated technical staff to keep interfaces current and secure.
Performance and outcomes: Committee members asked for outcome data — for example, whether the rural educator incentive is improving recruitment and retention in targeted districts. Whitworth said the State Board will provide district-level and cohort-level data; he cited two cohorts of the rural incentive with approximately 390 teachers in the first cohort and about 231 in a second cohort. Legislators asked for retention and placement data disaggregated by the program’s rural versus underserved definitions.
Next steps: The State Board agreed to return written information to the committee about program outcomes, retention measures and the specific districts and amounts served by the rural/underserved educator incentive.
