An education bill that ballooned to 153 pages during floor debate before passage in the Missouri Senate is a key topic for the House to address as it returns from break this week.
State senators passed Senate Bill 727 on March 14, right before leaving for a weeklong break in their schedule.
Any amendments or changes the House makes would have to be approved by the Senate before being sent to the governor for approval. Under House rules, the Senate bill must be read a second time on the House floor before it can be assigned to committee.
The House Special Committee on Education Reform has set a committee hearing for Thursday morning, pending the bill's referral.
The piece of legislation addresses school funding, teacher pay and, among other things, would allow charter schools to operate in Boone County regardless of the sentiments of local school districts.
Senate President Pro Tempore Caleb Rowden, R-Columbia, spoke in support of opening up the possibility of charter schools in Boone County.
"Post-COVID, I started hearing from a lot of folks in Columbia," Rowden said on the Senate floor. "They were not satisfied with the options that existed."
"We're just trying to simply give another option for folks in Columbia," he added.
Boone County school districts, including Columbia Public Schools, released a letter opposing the legislation for allowing charter schools to operate in the county.
Suzette Waters, the president of the Columbia School Board, told KOMU that school funding was a chief concern.
"There's only one pie. So if the state money is being split between the traditional public schools and the charter public schools, the local funding is also split," Waters said.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education currently allows accredited districts to permit charter schools as long as the local school board or residents vote to approve it. The Missouri Charter Public School Commission holds approval power for charter schools in Kansas City and St. Louis.
Additionally, DESE allows students living in unaccredited school districts to attend an approved charter school in the same or a neighboring county.
"Every other place in the state, besides Kansas City and St. Louis, charter schools would have to be approved by their local board, and this bill would not allow that provision," Waters told KOMU. "And that's something we feel strongly about, that the decision to move to a public charter school should be approved by the community."
The original version of the bill, sponsored by Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Manchester, was only 12 pages and had drawn a Democratic filibuster. However, the final version that passed the Senate came after hours of closed-door meetings and two amendments adopted on the floor, offering legislative wins for both Republicans and Democrats.
The bill would raise the tax credit cap for the Missouri Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program, known as MOScholars, from $50 million to $75 million. It would also increase the cap each year based on the foundation formula for school funding and open the program statewide.
The threshold for student eligibility in the MOScholars program would also increase under the bill.
"This will capture a larger portion of the middle class," Koenig said. "The other thing it does is for kids that have IEPs (individualized education plans) or kids with disabilities, it increases the amount of the scholarship based on how the foundation formula is funded. So the scholarships are limited or capped at the amount of state adequacy target, and this would allow it to be increased for kids with disabilities."
Students with IEPs would be eligible to receive up to 175 percent of the state adequacy target. Additionally, English language learning students and students who received free or reduced lunch would be eligible for up to 160 percent and 125 percent of the target, respectively.
The legislation also delineates between "home school" students and "Family Paced Education" (FPE) students, a new category defined as "families that are educating their children within the context of their family." Koenig said the only functional difference is that FPE students are eligible for the MOScholars program.
"The reason why we did that is because we wanted to separate out those statutes," Koenig said in an interview. "So that way if at any point in time in the future, if there was a change of law, it would not affect homeschoolers who did not participate in the ESA program."
Koenig added that homeschoolers who become enrolled in the MOScholars program would thus become FPE students.
One provision aiding passage of the bill is a change in how the funding formula works for Missouri elementary and secondary schools. The formula is currently based on weighted average daily attendance. However, Koenig's bill would transition the formula over time to a combination of daily attendance and overall enrollment, beginning at 90-10 in 2026 and ending at 50-50 in 2030.
The transition toward an enrollment-based funding formula has long been championed by Democrats, as it allows schools to receive full funding for all of its students without events like flu outbreaks tanking attendance and impacting school funding.
A common goal for Republicans and Democrats is teacher pay, and the Senate bill would raise starting pay for Missouri teachers to $40,000 beginning in the 2025-26 school year. For teachers with master's degrees, their starting pay would increase to $46,000.
Salaries would also increase each year based on inflation starting in the 2028-29 school year. In addition to raising salaries, the bill has other provisions aimed at upping teacher recruitment and retention, including changes to the testing and certification processes and increasing the number of scholarships to education students at Missouri universities.
The bill would also allow school districts to increase pay for certain hard-to-staff positions, subject areas or schools.
The legislation would establish the Elementary Literacy Fund, which would provide grants to school districts and charter schools for home reading programs for kindergarten through fifth grade.
Starting with the 2026-27 school year, a majority of voters in any school district in a county or city of 30,000 or more residents can decide to adopt a four-day school week, under provisions in the bill.
The fiscal note for the latest version of the bill attaches a $235 million or more price tag. However, Koenig said that the real cost is more complicated.
"The bottom line number, if you add everything up, it's going to be higher than the $230 million," Koenig said. "But then if you start breaking apart each piece, for instance, like on teacher pay, which has a cost of around $40 million. Well, we funded it in the budget last year. We funded in the budget this year. So the fact that we're putting in statute really doesn't functionally increase the cost to the state of Missouri because we're already doing it."
He added that some of the measures in the bill could be cut in the appropriations process.
"There's also a couple of other provisions where it's subjected to appropriations, so really just depends on whether the legislature appropriates money for that particular program," he said. "If they don't, then it wouldn't have a cost to the state. The cost that is most real would be the change in the foundation formula."
The Senate's passage of SB 727 makes it one of just over a dozen bills to pass from the upper chamber to the House. Thus far this session, no Senate bills have been passed by the House.
The work of the Missouri News Network is written by Missouri School of Journalism students and editors for publication by Missouri Press Association member newspapers.