Mayor Adrian Fenty used his veto pen last week to strike a single $950,000 line item from the 2010 budget, temporarily stalling the city’s spending plan one month before the start of the fiscal year. Fenty rejected the D.C. Council’s effort to empower the State Board of Education to make its own budget and hiring decisions. Those powers currently rest with the executive, which controls public education in the District.

“Additional education investments should be tied to outcomes and results for students,” Fenty wrote Wednesday in a letter to Council Chairman Vincent Gray. “Instead, Council’s action with regard to the State Board weakens the established school governance structure and threatens to take the District’s education reform efforts backward.”