The Senate finance committee, during hearings on education funding formulas yesterday, replaced the Gallo bill (S2770) with the RIDE/Costantino bill from the House (H8094), according to a posting on RI is Ready's Facebook page. According to the post, the one change so far is pushing the implementation date to 2013.

If you want to read tea leaves, the Senate taking up RIDE's formula looks to me to be a pretty good indicator of the direction this thing is going to move, and this is not something that's likely to make anyone happy. Funding advocates will be disappointed at the two-year delay, and allegedly overfunded districts still puzzling over their allocations under Dr. Wong's Quadratic Mean are unlikely to find much solace in a temporary reprieve.

But there's a long way until a final vote, and in the general assembly, anything can happen.