The chair of the Senate Public Education Committee said he expects to hear the House’s public school funding bill by the middle of next week.
In an interview outside the Governor’s Mansion on Saturday, Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, told Reform Austin that the Senate is working on its changes to House Bill 2, the lower chamber’s flagship policy to send more money to the state’s struggling public school districts.
“We’re pretty much there, and I would say we’ll make significant progress by the middle of next week,” said Creighton.
HB 2 comprises half of what Speaker Dustin Burrows called the “Texas Two-Step,” along with the chamber’s private school voucher bill that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott basically signed into law on Saturday. (Abbott signed the Senate’s version of the voucher bill, Senate Bill 2, but the House changed it in committee to be almost identical to the House’s unpassed proposal.)
What’s in the House bill
The House’s roughly $8 billion measure would increase the basic allotment to public schools by about 6% over the next two years, boost teacher salaries, expand and increase performance bonuses for the state’s best teachers and significantly change the way the state calculates special education funding.
Several funding streams in the bill would boost teacher pay, one of Abbott’s stated policy priorities this session. In addition to the performance bonuses and direct salary hikes, 40% of the basic allotment increase would need to be set aside to raise salaries for school district employees other than administrators. (That’s a bigger share of the increase for pay than the 30% in current law.)
And special education funding has been a pressing issue for districts for several years, as schools handle more and more students with special needs than they did just a decade ago.
That’s partly due to the Texas Education Agency’s 2016 decision to end a policy that capped at 8.5% the share of students that could use special education services. Nationally, about 13% of students received special education services that year, according to that report.
But as special education needs rise, many school districts have had to pay for special education services out of their own budgets, despite significant federal and state funding that is designed to cover those costs. This year, that shortfall totals about $1.7 billion, according to the TEA.
To help address that, HB 2 would overhaul the way the state calculates special education needs for school districts. Right now, schools receive money based on the time they spend in a given setting, regardless of the intensity of their needs. The House measure would instead target spending to the individual needs of students, an approach that won HB 2 near-unanimous passage out of the lower chamber last month.
Still, many school districts and public school advocates had hoped for a bigger increase to the basic allotment, which would need to be more than three times bigger to make up for six years of high inflation during the pandemic
And some public school advocates remain wary of Abbott’s commitment to teacher pay and public school funding boosts now that he has signed a voucher program into law.
The House approved both HB 2 and SB 2 during the same floor session that began on April 16 (stretching into the wee hours of April 17 for SB 2), but vouchers became law over the weekend because the Senate passed the voucher bill in February. With less than a month left in the session, the school funding bill has yet to be discussed in a Senate committee and could die before becoming law.
What the Senate might change
The Legislature’s more ideologically conservative upper chamber already has considered several education bills that collectively align with many parts of HB 2. For example, Senate Bill 26, which the Senate passed in February, focuses more narrowly on expanding teacher performance bonuses.
But those proposals generally eschewed a larger raw increase to the basic allotment in favor of a more prescriptive approach, directing the money within the bill itself to specific grants or programs.
Though many of the Senate measures found bipartisan support, teachers and public school advocates in hearings argued that a bigger increase to the basic allotment would give schools the most flexibility to address their own most pressing issues. It also would be more efficient, they said, because administration costs for state programs eat into the actual funding that districts can use.
Creighton on Saturday acknowledged the chambers’s differences in philosophy, and suggested that his committee would incorporate both approaches into the bill before sending it to the Senate floor.
“The total numbers are not too far off, so it’ll be a combination of both specific allocations” from each chamber, Creighton explained.
