Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s education reform bill unanimously past the state Senate Monday with most of its original provisions, but not all of them.
After an entire weekend of negotiating between the governor’s office, Senate leaders and representatives of both teachers unions, a compromise agreement was reached, but not without some changes being made.
Some of those changes included allowing a minimum of 40 minutes, from the current 30, for elementary school planning periods as well as an extended school calendar.
“We went from a 43 week calendar to a 48 week calendar so that’s an additional five weeks that are available to make up snow days,” said Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s Chief of Staff Rob Alsop.
That period could also be used to provide time for school maintenance without students and teachers in the building.
Tomblin held strong on changing the way teachers are hired, depending less on seniority, however the compromise came in relation to weighting. Alsop said Weighting is not equal.
“We give the principal and faculty senate themselves double weighting on who gets hired,” said Alsop. “We put a provision in place that says that if the faculty senate, principal and superintendent agree, that’s who gets hired.”
Alsop said this provision gets those three groups to sit down and talk about who should be teaching their kids.
New hiring criteria included academic achievement, national board certification, and an “other relevant factors” category. Current criteria was also changed
permitting flexibility for evaluations, for specialized training, and for the amount of course work and degree level attained by a candidate.
permitting flexibility for evaluations, for specialized training, and for the amount of course work and degree level attained by a candidate.
The only area where an agreement by all parties could not reached was with teacher certification.
“Teach For America will not be authorized under this current version of the bill,” said Alsop. “That’s really the only issue where we were unable to reach a consensus on how to move that forward.”
Instead, the State Board will conduct an examination of all current and potential forms of alternative certification.
Monday’s bill also had several changes designed to limit additional postings and “bumpings” that occur.
But all in all, Alsop believes that the bill is better now after negotiations and maintains what the governor set out to do.
Once it was passed, the House of Delegates immediately assigned the bill to its education committee where it was expected to be looked at Tuesday. The bill could pass the full House by Friday.
