Thursday, August 19, 2010
Ninety-Ninth Regular Session
The Chief Clerk makes the following entries under the above date.
__________________
The Chief Clerk makes the following entries dated Friday, August
13
, 2010.
Relating to the state apprenticeship program and affecting small businesses.
Submitted by Department of Workforce Development.
Report received from Agency, August 11, 2010.
Referred to committee on Labor, Elections and Urban Affairs, August 13, 2010
.
__________________
The Chief Clerk makes the following entries dated Wednesday, August
18
, 2010.
Relating to somatic cell standards for dairy goat milk.
Submitted by Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
Report received from Agency, August 13, 2010.
Referred to committee on Agriculture and Higher Education, August 18, 2010
.
Relating to the design, installation or construction, inspection, and maintenance of plumbing.
Submitted by Department of Commerce.
Report received from Agency, August 13, 2010.
Referred to committee on Commerce, Utilities, Energy, and Rail, August 18, 2010
.
__________________
Wisconsin Council on
Children & Families
August 11, 2010
The Honorable, The Legislature:
We are please to provide you with this copy of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2010 KIDSCOUNT Date Book, State Profiles in Child Well-Being. As you know, the Casey Foundation published this state-by-state analysis of the well-being of America's children each year.
Wisconsin ranks 10th nationally in the 2010 Data Book. The new report reveals that between 200 and 2008, Wisconsin improved on five of the 10 measures of child well-being. Yet on three other measures, conditions worsened for Wisconsin's kids. Two measures were not comparable to previous years.
The 2010 Data Book is based on data from 2007 and 2008, primarily the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey (ACS). While this it the most recent data available for many of the measures, it does not capture the impact of the recent severe recession. In addition to the data included in the 2010 KIDS COUNT Data Book, information on hundreds of other measures of child well-being is available via the Kids Count Data Center, which offers tools for creating maps and graphs of the data at the national, state, country and city levels. The Data Center's Wisconsin data is available at
http://datacenter.kidscount.org/wi. It can also be accessed via the WCCF website at
http://ww.wccf.org/kidcount_data.php/.
Sincerely,
ken taylor
Executive Director
__________________
State of Wisconsin
Legislative Audit Bureau
August 12, 2010
The Honorable, The Legislature:
As required by
2005 Wisconsin Act 125, we have reviewed the pupil test score data provided to us by the School Choice Demonstration Project, which is a group of privately funded education researchers who are studying the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The Choice program provides publicly funded private school tuition for low-income children in Milwaukee.
Project researchers are conducting a five-year longitudinal study of Choice and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) pupils first selected in the 2006-07 school year. The representative sample includes 2,727 Choice pupils who were in the third through ninth grades in fall 2006 and a comparable group of 2,727 MPS pupils. The researchers are tracking changes in Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination scores and determining how participation in the Choice program affects changes in academic achievement.
S849
We reviewed the project's data for the 2008-09 school year, which is the third year the researchers arranged for the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination to be administered to Choice pupils. We analyzed and generally confirmed the analyses that they reported in April 2010, which show no significant difference in the performance of Choice pupils and similar MPS pupils after three years. However, we note that only 1,097 of the 2,727 Choice pupils in the researchers' sample, or 40.2 percent, remained in Choice schools in the 2008-09 school year.
As we discussed in our September 2008 and August 2009 reports, we are unable to review average pupil test scores at individual Choice schools because the project, citing confidentiality concerns, has not provided us with this type of information. As a result, we cannot provide legislators and other policymakers with information about academic performance specific to each of the 127 Choice schools that operated in the 2008-09 school year.
2009 Wisconsin Act 28 made several changes to the testing requirements for Choice schools, and the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination will be administered in Choice schools beginning with the 2010-11 school year.
We appreciate the courtesy and cooperation extended to us by project researchers as we conducted this review.
Sincerely,
janice mueller
State Auditor
__________________
State of Wisconsin
Legislative Audit Bureau
August 17, 2010
The Honorable, The Legislature:
We have completed a review of the methodology the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) has used to establish rates for nursing home and assisted living care provided to residents of the Wisconsin Veterans Homes at King and Union Grove. This review is the first phase of our comprehensive evaluation of veterans home operations.
From January 2008 to January 2010, daily "private pay" rates for veterans in Union Grove's skilled nursing facility who do not qualify for Medical Assistance or Medicare funding have increased by 45.8 percent, which resulted in an annual cost increase of $29,500. Private pay rates in Union Grove's assisted living facilities increased by as much as 58.6 percent for veterans and 284.6 percent for spouses living with veterans, which resulted in annual cost increases of as much as $15,400 and $40,500, respectively.
