Days to Sine Die - 93

The Speaker of the House has released the first batch of priorities for session, none dedicated directly to education. HB 4 and HB 18 are dedicated to privacy online, HB 12 extended medicaid coverage to new mothers for a full year, and HB 300 exempts essential baby items and feminine hygiene products from the state's sales tax. None dedicated to education, but a big nod to the bipartisan atmosphere Speaker Phelan promised for the session. He will release more throughout session.

Some quick updates:

• The first House Committee on Public Education hearing will happen on February 28th at 8am. It will be an organizational meeting and they will only hear from Commissioner Morath and/or Texas Education Agency Staff and Dr. Kathy Martinez-Prather, the Director of the Texas School Safety Center. You can watch the hearing here.

• Article III Appropriations Subcommittee will meet on February 27th at 9am to hear from Commissioner Morath and agency staff who will discuss the education budget. You can watch the hearing here.

• The Senate Finance Committee has named work groups. On article III, the Chair will be Senator Creighton and members will be Senators Bettencourt, Hancock, and Zaffirini. Generally work groups are set to discuss topics and present their findings to the larger committee, but they cannot take official action.

• Jack Reed has officially been hired as the Public Education Committee director. He was Dan Huberty's Legislative Director and just left his position on the Government Relations team at TEA.

• Governor Abbott, in an interview with The Texas Tribune, said he would be traveling the state to make the case for vouchers directly to voters, particularly in rural areas.

• Ginger Averitt from Moak Casey joined the convening on the 23rd and shared a couple of legislative discussions that are happening across the Capitol:

• House and Senate leaderships are discussing a measure being referred to as "Compression Catch Up" that, while being revenue neutral for districts, would possibly lower the base tax rate by at least nine cents. This savings would stem from using actual property values from past years rather than the comptroller's estimates which have been low.
• Chairman Buckley is going to carry a large curriculum bill that would establish a state-level curriculum system that would provide curriculum and lesson plans for all core courses. The system would come along with incentive pay to use the system, but would be optional. Once we see this bill's text, I will of course circulate it to get your thoughts.
• Representative Bell is still working on a possible accountability bill that would add additional metrics to our accountability system.
• A complete switch from Attendance to Enrollment is being called "cost prohibitive" by leadership in the House and the Senate, but there are still discussions of moving some allotments over to being enrollment-based (Bilingual, Early Child, School Safety).
• The move to a Service Intensity Model for Special Education funding is possibly being attached to vouchers.

• Ginger will join via zoom for our March 9th Convening as well, but there is a good possibility we will see more updates and possibly some changes to the intel shared above.