Cutoff Week is Here
The first cutoff of this year’s legislative session is today, February 17, where policy bills must pass out of their committee of origin. The deadline for bills to move out of fiscal committees (House Appropriations and Senate Ways and Means) is next Friday, February 24. My bill tracking list will thankfully get shorter tomorrow, and we’ll be able to focus on the significant bills that remain in play.
Update on the Principal Bills
SB 5085, our principal bill, has a striking amendment posted on the Senate Floor Calendar. While it has not yet been scheduled for a vote, we hope that happens soon. You’ll see in this amendment that the revised bill would still do these three things:
provide more protections for assistant principals,
allow principals and assistant principals to retain years of experience as educators if transferring to different roles,
and clarify required training for evaluations.
In addition, this amendment removes the section that would have allowed principals and assistant principals to bargain working conditions. We asked Senator Lisa Wellman to remove this language after many hours of conversation with our board members and after meeting several times with WASA. We plan to meet soon with WASA to begin identifying tangible solutions that will attract, retain, and sustain our school leaders.
At the same time, Senator Kevin Van De Wege came forward with an idea to provide a minimum salary for assistant principals that is 5% higher than the maximum salary on each district’s teacher salary schedule (base pay) and a minimum salary for principals that is 15% higher than the maximum salary on each district’s teacher salary schedule (base pay). There is also a clause that assures that no one would go backward from their current salary. We don’t know the financial impact or cost of this amendment. We hope these gaps already exists in the majority of our districts, but we know that this may not be the case everywhere.
Senator Wellman also introduced SB 5175 which would allow (not require) districts to offer principals up to a three-year contract. This bill moved out of the Senate Early Learning and K-12 Committee and was recently pulled a step closer by the Senate Rules Committee to being placed on the Senate Floor Calendar.
Both of these bills address some important pieces to provide greater job protection and support for you. We know the demands of your job are significant. We also believe these changes are critical in order to attract future leaders. Stay tuned for much more about these bills next week.
Policy Bills
Several important bills had major revisions this week as they moved out of the education committees. Bill reports provided by nonpartisan staff are always helpful in understanding each bill’s key aspects (and the subsequent changes made to each draft), but they aren’t yet ready as of this writing. I will get a better sense of the substantive changes made to each bill from reading the updated versions and the very helpful bill reports. Until then, here are links to some key bills:
HB 1479 | Concerning Restraint and Isolation
HB 1550 | Establishing a Transition to Kindergarten Program
HB 1504 | Elementary Recess (companion bill in the Senate SB 5257)
SB 5670 | Permitting 10th Graders in Running Start (this bill was amended this week to allow 10th graders to take only online courses and only five credits/quarter)
SB 5048 | Eliminating College in the High School Fees
Here is the complete list of bills I’m tracking. (We’ll update this over the weekend after the February 17 cutoff.)
Get Involved
Our advocacy efforts need all of our voices to contribute to the process. There are many different ways (big and small) that you can get involved in these efforts. Your participation can be as easy as doing an action alert to email your legislators or signing in support of a specific bill. Or, if you feel really passionate about a particular bill, we would love to have you testify. It takes all of us to make an impact!
If you have questions or comments or want to get involved, please reach out to me.
