Four education bills debated yesterday, one in the House and three in the Senate, were all passed on final action votes this morning.

In the House, HB 2773, the Safe and Secure Schools Act was passed on a vote of 119-5. The bill, which was supported by KNEA, would require the State Board of Education to work with other agencies to develop standards for school security and school safety plans. Local school districts would be required to develop security and safety plans and submit those plans to the State Department of Education. The bill would also allow schools to offer firearms safety instruction using the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program or another research-based program. Such instruction would be optional.

The Senate passed three bills:

SB 352 makes adjustments to the school transportation formula, moving the funding for transportation from the highway department to the state general fund and codifying in a slightly different way than the “curve of best fit” calculation being used by the State Department of Education in distributing funding.

SB 422 repeals the 10% at-risk funding floor and expanded uses of capital outlay funds – two issues flagged by the Supreme Court as equity violations in the last Gannon decision. The bill also changes two LOB provisions that the Court deemed to be equity violations. One provision would have based LOB aid on the prior year’s LOB; that was repealed but the new bill requires advance notice to the state of a district’s intent to raise the LOB. The other provision dealt with changes in the LOB election process. The new bill allows a protest petition process for LOB increases. Some believe that this will still not be acceptable because of evidence that it is much more difficult to raise a property tax in a low-income community than it is in a wealthy community.

Both of these bills go now to the House which is working on its own transportation and equity fixes.

The Senate also passed Sub for HB 2602, the bill establishing the dyslexia task force. This bill had already passed the House but the Senate made changes to the make-up of the task force. The bill now goes back to the House for a vote to either concur in the Senate changes (and send the bill to Governor Colyer) or to non-concur and form a conference committee. Advocate groups believe the changes to the bill made by the Senate are improvements over the House version and hope the House will simply concur and move the bill to the Governor for quick action.