This week Kim Green and I (along with Steve DeWitt and Jamie Baxter from ACTE) had a positive meeting at the Office of Management and Budget to discuss future Perkins funding.  We met with David Rowe, the Education Branch Chief and Christine Leininger, the program examiner responsible for career technical education within the education branch.   These two people play a critical role in the White House budget development process as OMB is part of the Executive Office of the President. 

They are just beginning their work on NEXT year’s budget proposal.  Here is how the process works.  Starting this week each agency submits their initial budget request to OMB.  Over the course of the next two months or so OMB and the agency discuss priorities, goals of the Administration, and budget realities to come up with the request that will be included in the President’s budget for each department.  Around Thanksgiving OMB lets each department know what the President’s request will be.  In DC terms this is known as the “pass back”.  While there may be some tweaking of the numbers over the ensuing several weeks, essentially this is the FY 2011 budget proposal that will be introduced by the President the first week of February and considered by Congress.

We let Mr. Rowe and Ms. Leininger know about changes and innovations that are taking place as a result of Perkins IV and talked about how the goals of the programs align with many of the Obama Administration’s priorities.   While it was important that we got to share this type of information with them, what was encouraging is that they were both knowledgeable about CTE and asked many questions about how the money is being spent,  accountability, demographics of students and programs, data collection and the various priorities for Perkins state by state.

We are going to be cultivating our relationship with OMB, sharing information, data and resources. This was a good first step in building a very important, long term partnership.