Senate Committee Leaves School Funding Bill Pending for Now

The Senate Public Education Committee will wait until next week at the earliest to vote on its controversial changes to a historic $8 billion public school funding bill that it debuted in its  Thursday meeting.

Senators on that body spent more than four hours discussing and hearing testimony on the proposal on Thursday, cleft into two portions bookending the full chamber’s floor business, but left it pending for a future committee meeting.

House Bill 2 passed out of the lower chamber with near-unanimous bipartisan support last month, setting aside money to overhaul special education, raise teacher pay, expand performance bonuses and offer free preschool for public teachers, to name just a few changes.

Democratic representatives negotiated a larger increase to the basic allotment than its Republican sponsor originally proposed, and amended the bill to add provisions to fund full-day preschool and bilingual education.

The Senate sat on the measure for three weeks while negotiating with House leaders on the details of its own committee substitute version of the bill. While it kept the lower chamber’s roughly $8 billion price tag, Senate leaders gutted the increases to the basic allotment to a less than 1% bump and much more strictly prescribed where and how districts will be able to spend that money.

Though the Senate negotiators behind the changes have stated that the bill would represent the largest single investment in public schools in the state’s history, school districts have criticized the chamber’s approach as clunky, treating all districts as though they have the same needs. Instead, they’ve argued, a flat increase to the basic allotment would give them the most flexibility to address the problems unique to their system.

For just that reason, at least one superintendent told the Houston Chronicle that his district still would be running a deficit under the Senate version because it wouldn’t give districts more discretionary money. 

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday affirmed his support for the broad details of the Senate changes, as did the leaders of both chambers of the Legislature — House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, and Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who serves as the Senate president.  

At press time Friday, with fewer than 17 days left in the session, no Senate Public Education Committee meetings yet had been scheduled for next week, according to information posted on to the Texas Legislature Online.