Idaho Senate Committee advances IDLA funding cuts without last-minute changes
By: Ryan Suppe and Kevin Richert
Originally posted on IdahoEdNews.org on March 27, 2026
The Senate Education Committee on Friday rejected eleventh-hour amendments to a bill cutting state funding for the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance (IDLA) and advanced the legislation unchanged.
House Bill 940 now goes to the full Senate. The House passed the bill on a 48-22 vote Wednesday.
The bill would cut about half of IDLA’s $26 million budget through a number of policy changes. It would eliminate the virtual course platform’s elementary programs and cut state funding for driver’s education. It would also prohibit “custom sections,” courses taken by students who are all from a single district, unless the district can’t find a teacher for the course.
On Thursday, Sens. Codi Galloway, R-Boise, and Cindy Carlson, R-Riggins, proposed significant changes to the bill, including one that would have lowered the threshold for IDLA courses to qualify as a custom section.
Senate Education members voted Thursday to hold the bill until Friday giving them more time to consider the proposed amendments. “I appreciate being able to have the extra time to look at this,” Sen. Kevin Cook, R-Idaho Falls, said Friday before making a successful motion to send the bill to the Senate floor as is.
Three school district superintendents, IDLA’s superintendent, the Idaho Association of School Administrators (IASA) and the Idaho School Boards Association spoke against the amendments.
Andy Grover, IASA’s executive director, said districts lean on IDLA’s custom sections to fulfill graduation requirements — including recent courses that the Legislature required without providing additional funding to hire new teachers.
“Somehow, we have teachers out there that just do nothing during the day,” Grover said. “That almost never works, and we have to look to IDLA to meet those needs.”
HB 940 defines a “custom section” as an IDLA course in which 100% of enrolled students come from the same school district. One of Galloway’s proposed amendments would have brought the threshold down to 50% for districts with fewer than 1,500 students and 25% for districts with 1,500 or more students. The state wouldn’t have funded IDLA enrollments for students from the same district beyond these percentages.
IDLA Superintendent Jeff Simmons said Friday that custom sections have been “sold to legislators as an abuse” of the platform's funding model, but they’re “typically being used to fill gaps that schools are unable to meet.”
“Many of these gaps were created by this Legislature as new graduation requirements such as middle school career exploration and digital literacy,” Simmons said.
Another amendment, proposed by Carlson, would have made IDLA’s state budget “subject to appropriation,” and would have prohibited the platform from drawing on a public school stabilization fund when enrollment increases mid-year.
The budget-setting Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee already included similar language in IDLA’s appropriation next fiscal year, but the amendment to HB 940 would have made it permanent — effectively capping the platform’s enrollment unless the Legislature agreed to increase it.
“The appropriation bill that many of you haven't seen has intent language that sets aside code and makes policy,” said Sen. Janie Ward-Engelking, D-Boise. “This would be policy made by the germane committee.”
Ward-Engelking supported advancing HB 940, without the amendments, but “I do worry about the cuts,” she said. “I hope that we can still provide all these services to our students.”
Carlson said the amendments would have made the bill better. Carlson also said she was surprised that superintendents who testified Friday were on board with advancing the bill, as long as it didn’t have amendments. “I'm surprised that they are not screaming about this bill.”
