State Board office seeks new IT hires, $15M workforce grant and funding shifts as budget grows

Budget and staffing increases at the Office of the State Board of Education (OSB) were the focus of questions Tuesday as agency leaders detailed recent transfers into the office and a slate of new budget requests, including a one‑time $15 million public–private workforce capacity grant proposed by the governor.

The requests and organizational changes matter because OSB now oversees functions that were previously housed elsewhere — notably IT and data management, school safety and security, internal audit and risk management — and the office asks the Legislature to fund new staff and one‑time projects tied to those responsibilities. Budget and Policy Analyst Kevin Campbell told the Joint Finance Committee that “Idaho Code section 33 1 0 1 creates the Board for the General Supervision, Governance, and Control of all state educational institutions,” and that the board has used its policy authority to centralize several functions under the Office of the State Board.

Campbell said OSB currently has 84.25 authorized full‑time positions with eight vacancies and a five‑year average authorized count of 55.95 FTPs, a difference he attributed to several recent transfers into the office. He also outlined a history of large federal COVID and ARPA awards that distorted multi‑year appropriation/expenditure comparisons.

OSB Executive Director Joshua Whitworth told the committee the centralization aims to reduce duplicative…