The Texas House has passed two education-related bills that include $4.5 billion for teacher pay raises and an increase in the annual per-student base funding
Teacher Pay Boosted in Texas
The bill would create minimum salaries ranging from $35,000 to $63,000 for teachers, depending on experience and level of education. The bill also increases funding for special education and fine arts. However, some education advocates worry that the per-student funding is not enough to keep up with inflation, which has grown by 17% in the last four years. To address this issue, the bill creates a method to adjust the per-student funding for inflation every other year, starting in 2025.
In other news, the Texas House passed a bill that would require electrical vehicle (EV) owners to pay a $200 annual fee to the state. The bill’s supporters argue that EV owners should pay higher vehicle registration fees because they do not pay fuel taxes built into the price of fuel, which are used to fund the state’s highway system. The state fuel tax on both gasoline and diesel is 20 cents per gallon. However, opponents say that the bill could slow the expansion of EVs in the state, which pollute less than vehicles using carbon-based fuels. They also note that the fuel tax funds only 29% of what is spent on Texas highways.
A bipartisan effort to decriminalize the use of fentanyl test strips has stalled in a Texas Senate committee after passing the Texas House with a near-unanimous report
Fentanyl is often mixed with more expensive drugs such as heroin, leading to thousands of fatal overdoses, including more than 5,000 in Texas from July 2021 to July 2022. The testing strips are currently treated as drug paraphernalia.
Finally, the Texas House passed a bill that would require school districts to place at least one armed officer on each campus. The measure comes almost a year after a mass shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde. Any officer or school employee would have to complete handgun safety training. The measure also requires at least one audit for intruder detection each year in all districts.
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