By RYAN QUINN
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Reducing the role of seniority in teacher layoff decisions, and allowing families to put public school funding toward private schooling and home schooling, were both concepts that school employee unions opposed and that saw supportive bills fail during this year’s legislative session.
This week, the ideas resurfaced in legislative interim meetings. But this week’s presentations didn’t include details on specific legislation.
And, unlike the interim meeting presentation on “education savings accounts” that preceded this year’s session, a presentation Sunday on the accounts focused just on the idea of providing them to special education students. Education savings accounts act like private school vouchers, but can also pay for at-home tutors and other expenses.
House Education Committee Chairman Paul Espinosa, R-Jefferson, said there seemed to be a little more interest, at least in the House of Delegates, for limiting the possible accounts to just special needs students.
When asked whether he will push a bill affecting seniority in employment decisions and one establishing education savings accounts, Espinosa said decisions still are being made and that he’s still measuring interest from lawmakers.
Following the interim presentation on the accounts before this year’s session, there wasn’t much discussion of them during the actual 2017 regular session.
On March 23, late in the session, the Senate Education Committee did pass Senate Bill 273, which established education savings accounts that would allow parents with income low enough to claim the federal earned income tax credit to use public money to provide their children homeschooling or send their children to private schools, including religious schools.
Only 1,000 students could access the accounts at any one time, and priority for receiving an account would be based on order of applications received. The bill didn’t progress.
Senate Bill 401 got further during this year’s session. That bill, which managed to pass out of the entire Senate, would have removed the statewide mandate that public school teachers with the least amount of seniority automatically lose their positions when job cuts are made in a particular teaching area. The bill said the least qualified, as defined by county school board policy, would be the first to go when cuts occur.
On April 4, Espinosa’s House Education Committee shot it down, with him and six others voting for it but 14 voting against it.
Jonathan Butcher was education director for the Goldwater Institute when he presented about education savings accounts during the interim before this year’s session. Butcher, now a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation and a fellow with Goldwater, returned Sunday to talk about the special education only version of the concept.
Stephanie Aragon, a policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States, presented on states’ approaches to the use of teacher seniority, tenure and performance in layoff decisions.
Aragon, who said her organization wasn’t advocating for a specific approach, said teacher performance now is used as the primary factor in 13 states’ reduction in force policies.
Reach Ryan Quinn at [email protected], facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.
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