Blog
Archive March 2023
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Legislative Updates for March 30, 2023
| SCR 9 is scheduled to be heard in Senate Administration today. This means that we are one step closer to designating the first week of April as Gifted and Talented Week for a full 10 years. |
Legislative Updates for March 23, 2023
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Legislative Updates for March 16, 2023
| Last Friday was the bill filing deadline for the Legislature and it broke records. The total number of bills filed is 7,865. This beats the 2009 session by 446 votes. One of those bills filed was SB 2403 (Springer), Relating to required reporting regarding a school district's program for gifted and talented students. We are excited to assist Senator Springer in moving this through the process. This bill would allow us to collect data from TEA to better serve our students, teachers, and parents. |
Legislative Updates for March 9, 2023
This week, Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan announced six additional priorities for the House this legislative session.
Legislative Updates for March 2, 2023
| It was a busy week in the Lege! Speaker Phelan has announced two rounds of priorities for this session. He has four priorities and they are a little different than the Gov and Lt. Gov's lists of important items. This may be a signal of some interesting times ahead. The bill authors for the priority legislation are a mix of both Republicans and Democrats. Included in the Speaker's priorities are improving the privacy and security of all Texans, better supporting mothers and children in the state, defending the state’s economic growth over the past two years, and creating an opportunity for even more development as the population continues to expand at a rapid pace. |
Legislative Updates for February 23, 2023
| Last week Governor Abbott gave his State of the State in San Marcos at Noveon Magnetics, which was a change from the traditional joint session with the Texas House and Senate. He laid out his seven emergency items: cutting property taxes, ending COVID restrictions forever, education freedom for all Texans, school safety, ending "revolving door" bail, securing the border, and fighting The Fentanyl Crisis According to the Texas Constitution, the House and Senate can't pass legislation during the first 60 days of a regular session. By declaring these items as an emergency these items can be heard before the 60-day deadline. The text of his speech can be found here. |
Legislative Updates for February 16, 2023
The budget writers in both chambers have been meeting. Last week Senate Finance heard from Commissioner Morath about the agency's funding requests. This week House Appropriations heard a high-level overview of how public education funding works in Texas and learned about some proposed changes to property taxes. If you would like to learn more about the property tax proposal and how this would impact public education finance – the presentation begins at 2:21 here. House appropriations will hear from TEA later this month regarding their appropriations request.
Legislative Updates for February 9, 2023
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath presented the agency's appropriations request on Monday. In addition to his report and the requests for funding, there was a long discussion about the decline in enrollment and the funding formula. There is some talk about changing the way that the formula is calculated from average daily attendance to enrollment. This could be a massive change to how funds are distributed to our schools. If you would like to view this hearing you can find it here.
Legislative Updates for February 2, 2023
Due to Winter Storm Mara, the Legislature only met on Monday and did not conduct business the remainder of the week. This did not stop legislators from filing bills - we are up to 2,514 bills filed to date.
Legislative Updates for January 27, 2023
The big news from the Legislature this week is that Lt. Governor Patrick announced committee assignments. Senator Huffman will serve as Chair of Finance and Senator Creighton will serve as Chair of Education. To see the full list of Senate Committee assignments, go here.