Alert From Sen. Bryant: The Public School Forum’s Friday Report – June 26

3 STORIES BELOW

 

1. Budget Update

 A Look at the Senate and House Education Budgets

2. Forum News

Forum Executive Director: Cutting Teacher Assistants Defies Logic 

3. NC Highlight 

New Teachers and New State Employees Would Not Receive Retirement Health Care Under Senate Budget  

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The Friday Report   June 26, 2015

Budget Update   A Look at the Senate and House Education Budgets     Last week, the Senate passed their version of the 2015-17 budget. On Tuesday of this week, the House formally rejected the Senate’s version and the two chambers will now head to conference committee to seek a compromise budget.   In this article, we highlight several of the differences in  the education portions of the House and Senate budgets. Some of the largest differences include total spending on education, teacher salaries, teacher assistants and driver’s education.   Overall Budget The Senate budget provides a 2 percent spending increase, with the entire budget totaling $21.47 billion for 2015-16. In contrast, the House budget provides a 5 percent spending increase, with the entire budget totaling $22.2 billion.   K-12 Education Budget The Senate budget increases K-12 spending by $176.4 million, or 2.2 percent, over the current fiscal year. The House would increase the K-12 budget by $268.8 million, or 3.3 percent, over the current year, although $31.6 million of that is nonrecurring funding. Funding statewide enrollment growth accounts for $100 million of the K-12 increase in both the House and Senate budgets.   Teacher Assistants The Senate budget would reduce money for teacher assistants by $57.5 million next year and $166 million the year after. In addition,  $113 million would be eliminated from state lottery profits for the assistants. This would do away with approximately 8,500 teacher assistant positions over the next two years. Instead of funding teacher assistants, Senate Republicans want to spend $273 million more through mid-2017 ($80 million in 2015-16 and $193 million the following year) to reduce class size in grades K-3. The Senate plan would reduce kindergarten class size to a 1:17 ratio and grades 1-3 to a 1:15 ratio, resulting in a need to hire more than 4,000 additional teachers.    The House would keep teacher assistant staffing at this year’s levels.   Teacher Salary Both the House and Senate budgets provide salary increases for teachers, but their specifics differ.   The House budget provides a 2 percent across-the-board pay increase for teachers, state employees and retirees. The budget would also raise the salary of starting teachers to $35,000 per year and would pay for teachers to move from one salary step to the next.   Senate leaders say they provide an average 4 percent raise for all teachers, although the specific amount depends on how long a teacher has served and where they are in the series of salary steps. Like the House, the Senate budget raises starting teacher salaries to $35,000 per year, but it does not fund an across-the-board pay raise for teachers or state employees or a cost-of-living increase for retirees. Under the Senate’s plan, most of that extra money would go toward teachers with less than 15 years of experience. Those with 25+ years of experience would not see any increases to their current base salary from the state.   Under both House and Senate proposals, teachers going into their fifth year of teaching would receive the biggest boost. With the Senate plan, they’d go from $35,000 to $38,250; under the House, they’d receive $37,230.   Driver’s Education In contrast to the House budget, the Senate would not provide funding for driver’s education. Instead, it would allow local boards of education to charge students the full cost of the program. Currently, local boards of education can only require students to pay up to $65 for the classes. With the cap lifted, that cost could go up to $300 or more depending on the county. In 2016-17, the Senate budget would move driver’s education from NC DPI to the community college system.   Textbooks & Digital Learning The Senate would spend less than the House on textbooks, increasing the allocation by $29 million annually compared to $43 million increases each year in the House plan. The House also provides an additional $4.8 million in non-reoccurring funds for textbooks for 2015-16.   Vouchers Both the House and Senate budgets expand the Opportunity Scholarship program by $6.8 million each year, bringing the total cost of the program to $17.6 million each year of the biennium. However, unlike the House, the Senate allotted the funds to be recurring going forward. The NC Supreme Court has yet to rule on the constitutionality of the program. Senate and House leaders have petitioned the court to allow the program to disperse funds while the ruling is pending.   Master’s Pay Supplement The Senate budget provides no funding going forward to pay teachers a salary supplement for obtaining new master’s degrees. The House proposal would continue to provide a pay bump to those who obtain new master’s degrees in the disciplines in which they teach.   Additional Items of Note in the Senate Budget Directs schools and districts to develop school improvement plans for schools receiving a D or F under the school grading system, with the exception of D or F schools that exceed academic growth. No additional funding is attached to this directive. Reduces the Department of Public Instructions funding by $4.8 million, a ten percent cut Moves educator licensure from a section at NC DPI to a newly created Office of Educator Licensure which would report directly to the State Board of Education Proposes eliminating retirement health care benefit coverage for new teachers and any other state employee hired after January 1, 2016 Gives the State Board of Education ability to consolidate contiguous Local Education Agencies Senate budget does not appropriate funding for a new teacher recruitment and scholarship program, a school leadership development initiative, differential roles and pay for teachers pilot or the state’s new digital learning efforts, all of which were included in the House budget

 

 

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Forum News

 

Forum Executive Director: Cutting Teacher Assistants Defies Logic

 

 

Last week the N.C. Senate approved a budget that includes a $57.5 million cut to teacher assistant funding. This would eliminate 5,200 teacher assistant positions in the next school year and more than 8,500 teacher assistants over the next two years. With 7,000 fewer teacher assistants in classrooms today compared with the 2008-2009 school year – and nearly 50,000 more students – the Senate budget would eliminate roughly a third of all teacher assistants working in North Carolina today.

 

It is instructive to understand how teacher assistants came about in the first place. The position was first created and funded by the state as part of the 1975 Primary Reading Program. The goal of the program was to improve literacy among children in early grades. My mother was among the first group of teacher assistants hired in the state.

 

Significantly improved student achievement scores followed. It makes sense – adding another instructor immediately cut the ratio of student-to-educator in half, which gave more time for individualized attention to struggling students.

 

North Carolina was the first state in the country with a teacher and a teacher assistant in every classroom in kindergarten through third grade. North Carolina also implemented the nation’s first statewide full-day kindergarten around the same time. These kinds of investments began to cement North Carolina’s image nationally as a leader in public education at all levels, a brand that underpinned decades of economic growth in our state.

Senate leaders stated they cut teacher assistant positions in order to fund class-size reduction in grades K-3. Certainly that’s a laudable goal. But with the state’s crumbling teacher pipeline, steep declines in enrollment at all our university teacher prep programs and historically high teacher turnover, it is hard to imagine how public schools could possibly hire 4,000 qualified K-3 teachers within a year on top of the 10,000 new teachers they already must hire annually just to fill vacancies. And with some schools already converting fields and playgrounds to mobile classroom parking lots, significant new spending by local school systems and county governments would be required for these proposed smaller classes to actually have a place to meet.

 

Last year, Durham-based MetaMetrics conducted an analysis using the Public School Forum’s “Roadmap of Need” data. They wanted to see what correlations could be found between the 19 different indicators of youth “wellness” we track and future college and career readiness. MetaMetrics used the ACT test scores as the best proxy for college and career readiness. They found third-grade reading had the highest correlation of any factor, far more than parental educational attainment, poverty, single-parent households, suspension rates, income, unemployment and teen pregnancy.

 

This correlation supports the state’s recent emphasis, through the Read to Achieve initiative, on having every child reading on grade level by the end of third grade. Research shows there is a remarkable and disproportionate amount of reading growth that takes place between early kindergarten and third grade and that third grade is that critical juncture when learning to read becomes reading to learn. The importance of these early grades – and frankly pre-K – cannot be overstated. Students who are not reading at grade level by the time they enter fourth grade sometimes never recover. Clearly the N.C. Senate understood that when it championed Read to Achieve, which makes its proposed cuts to teacher assistants even more perplexing.

 

Unless you still have a child in school, you may not be aware of what TA’s do each day. In addition to their traditional role of assisting the teachers in the classroom, both with lesson planning and instruction, and often providing some consistency when a teacher needs to be out, on any given hour of the day teacher assistants are: Reading tutors. Math coaches. First responders. Bus drivers. Playground monitors. Parent communicators. Hug givers. Teacher-sanity savers. And that’s not even during assessments week!

Teachers are performing heroically every day, educating a more diverse student population to higher standards than ever before. They are teaching children from communities where poverty is increasing at an alarming rate, even in more prosperous counties. Many schools are woefully under-resourced, forcing some teachers to rely on web fundraising to buy school supplies to supplement what they buy out of their own pockets.

 

Knowing what we do about the importance of these early years and how stretched our classroom teachers already feel, is this really the time to remove valuable support and take away resources from the classroom? It defies logic. The upcoming budget conference between the House and Senate presents an opportunity to reverse course.

 

Keith Poston is the President and Executive Director of the Public School Forum of North Carolina.

 

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NC Highlight 

 

New Teachers and New State Employees Would Not Receive Retirement Health Care Under Senate Budget  

 

Future state employees could lose one of the biggest perks of government work: Free health insurance in retirement.

 

The proposed change appears deep within the Senate’s 500-page budget bill and attracted little notice when the budget was debated last week. Senate leaders say the state must rein in rising costs associated with retiree health coverage.

 

“North Carolina has a massive $26 billion unfunded liability for retiree medical coverage, and the Senate budget is a prudent way to address the long-term viability of the State Health Plan,” said Shelly Carver, a spokeswoman for Senate leader Phil Berger.

 

Benefits wouldn’t change for any current state employees, but anyone hired after Jan. 1, 2016, wouldn’t be eligible for health care benefits in retirement. That, Carver says, “would ensure that current state employees are not affected and maintain their coverage throughout their retirement.”

 

Currently, state retirees can enjoy fully subsidized health care coverage if they’ve worked at least 20 years for the state and meet age requirements. Employees who retire after 10 to 20 years pay half the cost of their coverage.

 

Sen. Tom Apodaca, who chairs the Pensions, Retirement and Aging Committee, said he couldn’t comment on the proposal because it came from the Senate’s top budget writers – not his committee. And Sen. Harry Brown, one of the chamber’s lead budget writers, walked away from a reporter without speaking when asked about the change.

 

The State Employees Association of North Carolina, or SEANC, says killing the retirement benefit is a bad idea. “Once you take that away, what incentive is there to work for the state?” said Chuck Stone, a SEANC lobbyist on health care issues. “We are in a rush to have the worst State Health Plan coverage in the United States of America.”

 

Stone says that between stagnant wages and other cuts, “we are having trouble recruiting and retaining career level state employees,” adding that the retirement change could mean top university professors and other sought-after professionals could head to other states or the private sector.

 

A number of states offer employees subsidized insurance for their spouses and children, but North Carolina doesn’t. “North Carolina’s response has been, ‘But we provide retiree coverage,’” Stone said, adding that he estimates about half of states have a similar offering for retirees.

 

Even without the elimination of retiree health coverage, SEANC points out that the legislature isn’t putting additional money into the State Health Plan for the next fiscal year. “Neither the House nor Senate budgets appropriate an amount of money adequate to provide for health care inflation,” Stone said.

 

For example, the House spending plan would cap monthly employer contributions at $5,479; the Senate’s plan would lower the cap by about 2 percent, to $5,378.

 

The House budget would direct $71 million to the State Health Plan’s reserves in fiscal year 2016-2017 – but only if State Treasurer Janet Cowell adopts “sufficient measures to limit projected employer contribution increases during the 2017-2019 fiscal biennium.” The Senate wouldn’t add new money to reserves, but its budget would require the health plan to maintain reserves equal to 20 percent of its annual costs.

 

SEANC worries such a mandate will lead to higher costs for employees and retirees in the program as its administrators pinch pennies to fill the reserves.

 

The group is backing the House’s budget as the two chambers begin to work toward a compromise spending plan. “We hope that the Senate will take the sacrifices and the dedication of public employees into consideration,” Stone said.

 

For now, SEANC is getting a late start lobbying against the elimination of retiree health benefits. Stone said he was “caught off guard” and heard about the provision around the time the Senate voted on the budget last week.

 

Campbell, C. “Future NC Employees Would Not Receive Retirement Health Care Under Senate Budget.” News & Observer. 6/24/15.