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Friday, March 29, 2019
Day 75
This Week’s Recap
This week was the last meeting of House and Education committees for the year. As is to be expected, a few strike-everything amendments came up quickly. SB 1346 (NOW schools; tests; menu of assessments) changes the year that grades 3-8 will be able to select an assessment from the menu of assessments from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2023-2024 school year. This will allow the Board more time to implement this change carefully and correctly, which ASBA is in full support of.
Another striker was SB 1147 (NOW tobacco products; vapor; vapor products) We sent out an Action Alert on this bill, as it was originally drafted to allow people over 21 to bring tobacco products onto campuses for personal use. Our advocacy network and many others flooded legislators with concerns about this, which apparently was a drafting error and was taken out of the bill with a verbal amendment. We still do not support SB 1147, as it also forbids any political subdivision other than the state from regulating tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. But the most concerning part of the bill is gone, which is great news. It passed out of committee 5-4.
Head over to Capitol Impact for our staff summaries of all the bills we heard this week.
March SBE Update
On Monday, the State Board of Education held its March meeting. Action was consumed mostly by A-F Accountability and the growth indicator, Menu of Assessments, and English Immersion models. The Board is still working to select a model to calculate growth in order to assign A-F letter grades for high schools in 2018-2019, in light of the different Menu of Assessments choices that schools made. The model proposed to include a growth indicator would have three different measurements included: subgroup growth on selected assessment, subgroup graduation rate improvement, and subgroup dropout rate improvement.
Three high school Menu of Assessment vendors, to be made public ASAP, were approved- however, consideration of policies and procedures for the statewide assessment will not take place until April’s meeting. Last but not least, the Board adopted two SEI block models in anticipation of the increased flexibility and reduced time requirements of English learners that will result from the enactment of SB 1014. A framework for schools to submit their own proposed models is supposedly still in process as well.
Click here to read the full summary of action.
Friday Advocacy Updates
Click here to watch our most recent Advocacy Update on Facebook Live. Session is beginning to wind down, and we have a lot to update you on!