Senate sends governor his teacher pay equity bill
NASHVILLE (AP) — The Senate unanimously approved legislation Thursday raising the average salary of Tennessee teachers, in hopes of ending a 12-year court battle over funding equity among rural and urban schools.
The bill, crafted by Gov. Phil Bredesen’s administration, passed the House earlier this week and now goes to the governor to be signed into law.
It injects $35 million in new state dollars to equalize teacher pay, increasing the average salary to $43,127 annually from the current $28,600. It also requires local governments to pick up a larger share of the cost.
The governor’s first budget provided the state’s poorest school systems with $27 million in new funds last year as a temporary fix to give his administration time to craft a more permanent solution.
Bredesen called the bill’s passage gratifying.
“I thought it was a sensible approach to solving what could have been a very big problem at a reasonable price,” he said. “We made a down payment last year. We finished up this year with the help of all the interested parties. It was a completely open process and I think we got a great result.”
Despite legislators’ repeated efforts to ensure that school children across the state get adequate educational opportunities, the state Supreme Court three times has ruled the state’s funding formula unconstitutional.
Speaker Pro Tem Jo Ann Graves, who sponsored the bill, said it “satisfies the plaintiffs in our court suit, which is a good thing. That allows us to try to be free from the court and move forward.”
She said the issue will be addressed every so often to ensure the state doesn’t end up back in court.
Senators voted 16-15 to defeat an effort by Sen. David Fowler, R-Signal Mountain, to repeal the law in June 2006 if no settlement had been reached with the rural schools that have sued, or if the Supreme Court has not said the plan satisfied its ruling.
Fowler said urban school systems such as Hamilton County have been “taking it on the chin” since the first court decision in 1992, and under Bredesen’s proposal stand to lose $10 million they would otherwise get from the state.
“Let’s bring this litigation to an end, make them settle it, make the court tell us what we did is OK, and let’s get on to other business,” Fowler said.
Graves said Fowler’s amendment almost certainly would have landed the state back in court.
Senators also defeated Fowler’s effort to require a task force to look at the fiscal capacity of local governments and how much they’re contributing to their schools.
“If they want more money, they ought to be putting out more effort proportionate to others,” Fowler said. “I expect the richest man to give more, but proportionately we all should be trying to do the same.”
His amendment also would have required the task force to look at how money is distributed based on class size. He says urban systems often have to cover the entire salaries of additional teachers needed to meet state requirements but not accounted for in the distribution formula.
Graves said those issues will be considered by the task force, along with concerns about the amount of money that urban schools must spend on English-as-second-language classes and help for at-risk students.
Sen. Charlotte Burks, D-Monterey, said she knows the urban schools have been “hit a little bit, but they need to remember that a lot of their tax money comes from rural areas,” which don’t have large tax bases to tap for school funds.
Jerry Winters, a lobbyist for teachers’ Tennessee Education Association, called the bill’s passage an important step that addresses the court ruling and “puts in place a new process for funding salaries in the future which should prevent the problem from reoccurring down the road.”
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On the Net:
Read SB3397/HB3510 at http://www.legislature.state.tn.us