We had some very good news. There was a breakthrough yesterday and we will
be delivering on teacher pay raises, school choice, more money into the school
funding formula, more money to rural schools with pilot programs for maternity leave,
school security, and a robust school choice plan that was passed earlier this session
and that the House held onto until we could get agreement on public education spending.
And it is historic. I'm told that when you add together the teacher
pay raises of five years ago and what the teacher pay raises will be this
time, and all the other dollars in the public education that it's an historic
high. Not as much money has been put into public education in the last
twenty five years as today. So cause of our economy, because we did
well during COVID and didn't shut down, because of the energy industry and the
diversification of Oklahoma's economy, we are sitting on substantial revenues that make it possible
for us to do this big plan in public education funding. The big thing
for me was teachers. We wanted to put as much into teacher pay raises
as possible. That was the sentence plan. And so now if you are
if you're a devote to four years experience, you're going to get a three
thousand dollars raise, four thousand for five to nine years, five thousand for
ten to fifteen years, and any teacher with fifteen or more experience, we'll
get six thousand dollars pay raise. There's also about one hundred and fifty million
dollars going into the formula. This gives superintendents and school boards flexibility about where
they spend those dollars. Could they could add to those pay raises, or
they could do support stack pay raises. UH. These pay raises that are
in UH that will be in this bill go to all certified staffs, so
this would be teachers and librarians UH and others who work in the field.
Then we have a ten million, three year literacy program. We are still
way behind in teaching our children how to read and be at grade level,
even though we have the Reading Sufficiency Act, So we're putting more money into
UM a literacy program. There will be a literacy literacy instructional UH person at
each school districts. There will be teams, there will be ways to spend
these dollars. There will be a school security piece of course. Um,
you know in Barrowsville we do an excellent job with school security. Uh,
this could be used resource offersers, it could be used for other security infrastructure.
And I believe ninety six thousand dollars it's going to go to each school
or school district. I can't remember. Let's see Public school District ninety sixty
thousand. That's the one hundred and fifty million for three years, fifty fifty
and fifty into school security. And then for the smaller schools who don't have
the advalorum collections that we are fortunate to have in Washington County, there will
be an increase in funding to the Redbud Fund and there so that's one hundred
and twenty five million. We help those schools that don't have the bonding capacity
that others do. And then in the funding formula, we made changes to
the weights. Now outside the legislature and the school public school world, most
people don't understand these. But rural school to get a transportation weight because they
have to transport kids among much wider areas. That hasn't been increased in nineteen
eighty six. So we're going to increase the transportation rate. We're going to
increase the economically disadvantaged student weight. Of course, we have those kinds of
kids everywhere in the state, but more of them are concentrated in the rural
area, so that will be another bump to rural schools. And been thirdly,
I can't remember what. Thirdly what's what's thirdly? Well, I'll get
back to that. Oh, the small school set aside, we are raising
the number of students in a school that make it qualify as a small school
under the formula, and it will capture about seventy two to seventy five percent
of our school district. Now we'll go up from five hundred and twenty nine
kids to I think seven hundred or seven hundred and fifty kids, will push
some additional formula dollars through to those schools. All told, it's about a
six hundred and fifty million dollars investment six hundred twenty five in recurring revenues to
public school. And then on the other side, on the school choice side,
the bill that was already passed. If you have a just a growth
income of seventy five thousand dollars or less, a parent will get a credit
or may access a credit of seventy five hundred per child or the tuition at
the school that you have selected, whichever is less. If you make seventy
five to one fifty, that credit will be seven thousand, one hundred and
fifty to two twenty five, the credit will be sixty five hundred, and
at two twenty five to two fifty, six thousand, and then two fifty
or more can access up to five thousand dollars per child credit. There's also
I'm very glad to say homeschooling parents who want to keep receipts and report expenses
may access a tax credit of up to one thousand dollars per child. Very
important to me to include those groups of parents in the program. I know
that's a lot of data, Tom, but it is very exciting that we've
pulled this off. Honestly, when we didn't hear back from the Speaker last
Wednesday afternoon and everybody else was celebrating, my heart sank, and then the
Speaker basically said nothing's going to happen till Monday. What I wasn't aware of
is there were negotiations all through the weekend, so that gave us the opportunity
to come together on Monday morning and the negotiators to be able to seal a
deal. So now we're in a sprint. We are going to get all
these education funding bills done this week. It's important to do that so they
get to the governor's death and should he want to veto woman he's not,
we would have time to override his veto the other eleven twelfth of the budget.
Think about that. Education is still where we spend the most money,
followed by healthcare, but you have billions of dollars still yet to appropriate for
all these other agencies. But we could act on that till we knew what
defunding for public schools was going to be. So even though they've been working
behind the scenes really for the past year, because they're working on the budget,
as soon as one fiscal year starts, they start on the next one.
We're scrambling now to see what's left. There's a limit to what we
can spend and recurring expenses, and also looking at whether or not the economy
will soften, so there's not as much left to appropriate for other needs in
the state. But that's why they're working on now, and I believe we
are going to try to run a concurrent session, which means being two sessions
at once, so that we can still get these things passed in order to
be able to override a veto if that's necessary. Tom, that's it in
a nutshell,