We have completed week 6 of the 9 week Legislative Session. This week, both the House and Senate passed their budget proposals out of their individual chambers. Our team at GrayRobinson has put together a great side by side comparison of the Education budgets from each chamber which you can find HERE. The budget now moves into conferencing where the chambers negotiate and work to come to an agreement on one budget. We anticipate the start of budget conferencing very soon and will let you know as soon as it is scheduled.
HERE you will find the legislative bill tracker supplied to us by our team at GrayRobinson. All of the bills we are tracking are listed on the report in numerical order. A few of the bills to highlight:
- HB 1193 Student Assessments by Rep. Plasencia was heard in its second committee in House PreK-12 Appropriations. There was robust discussion around the amount of testing time as well as the automated school grade accelerator that was added to the bill in its previous committee stop. It passed out of committee unanimously and awaits to be heard in its last committee.
- HB 899 Mental Health of Students by Rep. Hunschofsky passed through its last committee unanimously. This bill revises the data to be analyzed around involuntary examinations as well as require charter schools to report the same data on involuntary examinations as traditional public schools. The bill now goes to the House floor for 2nd reading. The Senate companion remains on 2nd Reading.
- SB 802 School Safety by Sen. Gruters was heard in Senate Education Appropriation. In this committee, the bill was amended to remove the punitive measures of the loss of school superintendent and school board salaries for noncompliance and added provisions of adoption of a universal suicide screening instrument. This amended language was adopted and passed unanimously out of committee. HB 1421 by Rep. Hawkins was heard in House Education Committee, the last committee stop. It was also amended to more closely align to the Senate version and passed out of committee unanimously. It now moves to 2nd Reading in the House.
