Movement in the Legislative Process

Earlier last week, the Indiana Senate took HB1367 and stripped the House features out and inserted language that would degrade public education by requiring teachers to bear the brunt of any emergency funding costs with mandatory pay and benefit cuts and elimination of annual pay increments.

Yesterday, the Indiana House of Representatives re-inserted language into SB309 that was supported by the Indiana Superintendents Association, Indiana School Boards Association, Indiana Federation of Teachers and Indiana State Teachers Association.

There have been other changes to S.B. 309.

You can read about this legislative process here:

It is very important that we continue to contact our legislators and tell them about budget cuts that have happened or are going to happen if they do not provide emergency education funding relief. They need to know about current class sizes, class sizes that will result from r.i.f.s, program cuts, service cuts and all other essential elements that provide quality, well rounded educational experiences for our children.

If our children were blank slates, we could just transfer knowledge directly into their brains through direct instruction. However, scientific evidence does not support this view.

It takes many resources and an army of dedicated educational professionals to provide optimal, quality educational experiences for over 1.1 million children currently in Indiana Public School classrooms.

The cognitively diverse, heterogeneous populations of children in our classrooms deserve the best possible learning opportunities we can provide.

Children develop a lifelong love of learning and literacy when their are adequate numbers of educational professionals in position to respect and strengthen their individual abilities and facilitate their drive to learn.

Current trends in education funding indicate higher classroom sizes that will degrade the physical, emotional, and cognitive growth of students and the elimination of programs that are vital the development of innovative thinking skills critical to economic success in the 21st Century.

It is clear Indiana Public Educators have been asked to do more and more with less and less.

We cannot afford future failures of imagination.

Contact your legislators here.