NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Easily, the most contentious political battle up on Tennessee's Capitol Hill this year centers around the school voucher expansion. Now Tennessee teachers are learning that if one version of the bill moves forward, their scheduled raises could be in jeopardy.
Under the Tennessee House version of the voucher expansion, the money allocated for teacher raises would help fund other aspects of their education reform bill, which includes school choice.
In his State of the State address last year, Gov. Bill Lee promised that starting teacher salaries would hit $50,000 a year by the time he leaves office. As a result, teacher salaries were slated to go up this year to eventually hit that mark. But now, House Republicans have different plans for that money.
They need it to fund the many education initiatives they're pitching, including school choice, decreasing the number of tests high schoolers take, changing the teacher evaluation system and making adjustments to the controversial third-grade retention law.
Their bill also increases the amount of money the state pays for teacher health insurance, taking some of the financial burden off of the counties. House Republicans argue teachers could see more of an economic benefit from better insurance than a higher paycheck.
"That would increase the salary. Take home pay, let’s say take home pay of what teachers take in a lot of instances. It frees up a lot of money locally so they could take that and they could put back into teacher increase if they so choose. They don’t have to put it back into insurance," said Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville.
House Majority Leader William Lamberth, R-Portland, agreed.
"When we put teacher raises out there, there are many counties where they’re not getting raises," he's said. "So if you’ll just raise the amount we put towards their health insurance, that actually is money that could go directly into the teacher's pockets and that’s what we want to do.
TEA responds
I reached out to the Tennessee Education Association about the proposal. Tanya T. Coats, President of TEA, released a lengthy statement blasting the plan.
"While TEA has long advocated for increasing insurance premium support as a way to put more money in teachers’ pockets, it is the wrong approach to use raise dollars to pay for it. Shifting money away from salary will hurt a teacher’s retirement, which is based on a teacher’s salary in their final five years in the profession.
Without new funding to pay for the insurance proposal, this is the wrong approach and would provide no benefit at all to the thousands of educators who don’t get their health insurance through the schools,” Coats said.
Universal vouchers are a fundamental threat to the health of public schools in every community across Tennessee. Vouchers are especially harmful to rural schools in Tennessee, which rely heavily on state funding to provide for their students. Over the last several months, Tennesseans have overwhelmingly rejected expanding unaccountable and unproven voucher programs. Nearly half of the elected school boards in the state have passed resolutions opposing this plan.
Over 90% of Tennessee children attend public schools. The state should be looking for ways to enhance support for our public schools, not funding radical legislation Tennesseans overwhelmingly oppose. Out-of-state special interests pushing this legislation don’t understand that Tennesseans love their public schools and will fight any attempts to damage them."
Of course, the House version may not be the final version passed — if it passes at all.
As always, I will keep you posted as this moves forward.
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
