HILO, Hawai'i — The annual skirmish over state funding for public education began last night, with state Superintendent of Schools Pat Hamamoto announcing that Gov. Linda Lingle's administration has rejected $64 million in spending requests from the state Board of Education.

Hamamoto said education officials will take the board's request directly to the Legislature next year to ask that lawmakers provide the money anyway.

The board asked for an extra $94 million to cover public education needs. The Lingle administration responded by including $30 million worth of those requests in the proposed budget the governor will submit for the Legislature to consider in January, Hamamoto said.

Dropped from the Lingle budget proposal is a one-time $24 million request the department says it needs to convert to a single statewide school calendar and $5 million requested for a new program of performance incentives that would be built into principal contracts.

Also dropped from the administration budget plan was about $15 million the board maintains the school system needs to cover an expected rise in electricity costs.

Hamamoto said the new school calendar will require that about 6,000 teachers and other employees start work at the end of summer — two pay periods earlier than under the old school calendar. Longstanding union agreements require that those employees be paid for the additional work time, she said.

"They've actually worked, and they deserve to be paid. They worked for that money," she said.

State Budget Director Georgina Kawamura countered that the school system didn't properly justify the request.

The teachers "won't work a day more. They will all be working the same amount of days with that concept," she said of the new schedule. "We just could not understand the justification for that (extra money)."

Addressing the performance incentives for principals, Kawamura said, "We didn't know what the program is with regard to that." She added, "There's no program that they've created yet."

Hamamoto acknowledged that the program is still being developed, but she said if the state is going to use financial incentives to reward good work, principals need assurances the money will be there.

Kawamura said a BOE request for more than $2 million for the new weighted student formula was dropped from the Lingle budget proposal because the funding formula is being phased in by the Department of Education in a way that should not require any additional money.

As for electricity costs, Kawamura said her department used a model developed by the state Department of Accounting and General Services to calculate the amounts of extra money that each department would need.

Hamamoto questioned whether Kawamura's projection factored in the public school system's special power needs, such as a request for $5 million to power donated air conditioners.

Another $5 million the school system requested for technology upgrades also was dropped from the Lingle budget plan because there were "no specifics to that request," Kawamura said.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.