State educators got average 3% pay raises out of the just-concluded legislative session, but beyond that the co-president of West Virginia’s teachers union wasn’t blown away.
“It was not a great session,” Dale Lee, co-president of Education West Virginia, said on MetroNews Talkline.
House Bill 4765 — Teacher, School Personnel, and State Police Pay Raise — was completed just in the nick of time, 12 minutes to midnight on Saturday, fulfilling a pay raise promise from the governor and legislators.
State law requires lawmakers to pass bills for pay raises for those three groups of workers because their salary schedules are in state code. Other state workers are in line to receive average 3% pay raises through the general revenue budget.
But Lee said the final outcome for other education-related policies was disappointing.
A bill that would have provided additional financial support for special education students in public schools fell victim to the legislative clock. That bill did not reach agreement before midnight on the final night of the regular legislative session.
“We let the funding for the special needs kids fail at the very end,” Lee said.
He added, “special needs really needs to be addressed. And that’s that’s one of the most disappointing things in this session, is that we didn’t address those needs.
“The cost of educating our special needs students just continues to skyrocket, and many of them need one-on-one aids and one on one teachers and things like that. That really skews the funding formula.”
Lee noted there was no particular legislation to address the Public Employees Insurance Agency, where educators get their health insurance.
Legislation that would have refined the Hope Scholarship for students receiving their education outside the public school system fell by the wayside. The cost of the program continues to grow following expansion to all non-public students this year. The budget passed by lawmakers allocates about $290 million total for Hope.
“We didn’t address the issues of trying to put some guardrails on the Hope Scholarship,” Lee said.
Senate Education Chairwoman Amy Nichole Grady, speaking a day earlier on Talkline, also described a difficult legislative session.
“There are ways that it was successful. However, I probably can tell you in the six years I’ve been a senator this was my most disappointing session,” Grady, R-Mason, said on Talkline. “I left out of there Saturday night with a heavy heart, feeling disappointed.”
In particular, Grady had pushed all session for greater financial support for West Virginia’s public school systems.
In December, the state school board approved consolidations and closures of more than a dozen schools across six counties. The state board recently agreed to two more closures in Wayne County. The state also experienced a wave of school consolidations last year.
Legislation meant to address local school funding changed as the session went along, but a version at the end would have addressed the funding that supports special education students.
A major aspect of financial pressure on local school systems is the cost of special education because some students need extra help like one-on-one instruction or nurses.
A final version of that bill passed the Senate on Saturday. But because HB 5453 had changed so many times, the most recent version still needed to be approved or rejected by the House of Delegates.
The House got embroiled in the last hour of the session with a bill about halting students from transferring to homeschool status if there’s an active child protective services investigation. So delegates never managed to circle back to the special education funding bill. So it failed to be completed.
“I feel like a broken record because I feel like we talk about this every single year after after session and before session — you know that this is a priority, or should be a priority,” Grady said.
“But over time, we talk about it, try to come up with solutions, and then it never makes it into the final budget.”