HELENA — Class sizes will grow. Advanced placement courses will be eliminated. Special education classes will be scaled back and teachers educated in Montana will continue to flee for better-paying jobs across state lines.

At least that's what education advocates believe will happen if K-12 funding loses $10 more million to the Department of Public Health and Human Services in fiscal 2004 and 2005.

Human services is slated to get millions more in the next biennium at the expense of every state agency that uses general fund dollars. House Bill 2, the major budget bill for the session, preliminarily passed out of the House Appropriations Committee last week with an amendment offered by Chairman Dave Lewis, R-Helena, that cuts general fund in nearly every state agency by 1 percent next biennium.

The $17 million in general fund savings will be plugged into the human services budget, which currently faces a $70 million deficit over what spending would have been under current laws, adjusted for inflation. Almost all lawmakers agree that human services needs more funding.

But the Office of Public Instruction stands to lose $10 million in the deal.

"The big problem with the rollback is that it comes out of education," said Rep. Christine Kaufmann, D-Helena, who voted against HB2.

Rep. Don Hedges of Antelope was the only Republican to vote against HB2 in committee and he said he did so precisely because of the money grab from education.

"We said we were going to fund education first," Hedges said in an interview last week.

Lewis said in committee that it's only reasonable to ask all departments to roll back 1 percent to save services that help Montana's most fragile people, specifically the poor and the ill.

"We have some serious problems (in human services) we have to address," Lewis told his fellow lawmakers.

It's true that K-12 education has a billion dollar biennium budget. But education funding is not allowed regular state funding increases to cover the cost of inflation, and it's also been cut by $2 million in the last two years.

Republicans then rolled back all departments to year 2000 levels on the first day of this Legislature but later pumped $24.7 million back into education alone.

That's when Republicans made the claim that they were "funding education first."

The problem that the $10 million cut causes for education will be compounded by declining enrollments, since schools are allotted state money based on their student population, said Joe Lamson, communications director for the Office of Public Instruction.

Shrinking enrollments are projected to cost Montana's 441 school districts $15 million in the next biennium, Lamson said.

Add $10 million that the roll-back snatches from education to the $15 million the department will lose through declining enrollment and K-12 education ends up $25 million in the hole.

To Lamson, $25 million in lost revenue looks an awful lot like the $24.7 million Republicans put back into education earlier this session.

"We're basically back to where we started from when they rolled us back in the first place," Lamson said.

Education advocates said the burden of education costs will fall on the backs of local taxpayers. And that's already happening.

In 1991, local property taxes made up 13 percent of the state's education budget. In 2003, property taxes account for 30 percent of the budget. During that same time, the state's share of the education budget has dropped from 71 percent to 61 percent.

To alleviate cuts, the Office of Public Instruction and others — including some Republicans — support tobacco and lodging tax increases, as well as rental car taxes.

OPI has also called on lawmakers to use excess funds from the state's workers compensation fund to backfill the education budget.

Republicans are repeatedly asking their Democratic counterparts to pull $93 million from the coal trust fund, which Democrats say was not originally intended to pay for daily governmental expenses.

Democrats keep saying no, and focus instead on tax increases.

Despite the hard lines drawn in the sand, the director of the state's largest union of school and government employees said something's got to give.

"I don't think this is how it will end up," said Eric Feaver, president of MEA-MFT. He said the Legislature always makes changes to the budget before it's all over.

Feaver and many other lobbyists and government watchers are calling on lawmakers to reach across the political aisle and compromise for the sake of education, for the sake of the poor, for the sake of the state.

"These guys are not playing nice," Feaver said of the legislators. "They need a good kindergarten teacher."