Two words pop up anytime you ask someone about how the 87th Texas Legislative Session may affect Rio Grande Valley educators and students: the budget and COVID-19.

These issues go hand-in-hand in many cases, but the consensus among local lawmakers is that regardless of the state’s funding woes brought on the coronavirus, they’re going after all the funding they can get.

The only way, lawmakers say, local entities can address the Valley’s yawning digital divide — learning gaps exacerbated by almost a year of remote instruction and disruptions to the delivery of critical school meals — is if they have the money to do so.

Valley entities have done that since the pandemic arrived last year, spending money to buy hot spots and set up internet infrastructure for districts that couldn’t provide every student with a laptop or iPad, and sometimes reported over half of their students without Wi-Fi in their homes.

Educational entities, municipalities and Hidalgo County pumped millions of dollars, often aided by state or federal funds, into programs that helped school districts erect Wi-Fi towers and distribute remote learning equipment, amid a variety of other programs meant to help Valley learners learn.

Local districts have delivered hundreds of thousands of free meals to students, along with things like learning packets for kids without internet and school supplies that remain important even if class is happening online.

This month Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar said lawmakers face a $1 billion budget deficit, down from his dire prediction of a $4.6 billion deficit over the summer, but still far from ideal.

Despite the financial challenges, Valley lawmakers have already filed over a dozen bills related to education they hope to see passed in this session. Those bills range from items as far from the pandemic as legislation laying the groundwork for a Valley law school, to items directly tied to it, like a bill relating to COVID-19 insurance coverage.

Others address school telehealth programs, accessible playgrounds and suicide prevention.

Budget concerns continue to hang over the session, state Rep. Terry Canales said. Even though House Speaker Dade Phelan assured members that cuts would not affect funding for education, concerns remain.

Last year, Canales said, the Texas House of Representatives led a bipartisan effort to invest more than $4 billion in state education, also bolstering teacher salaries and the retirement system. This year the state may not be so generous.

“So that being said, with a budget shortfall, the concerns that we would take from the progress that we made last session is very real,” Canales said. “And although the speaker, his agenda, has laid out that we’re not going to do that, the reality is it’s yet to be seen.”

Traditionally, Canales said, education is an early cut for a legislative session facing a shortfall.

“Education advocates are pretty deeply concerned on whether we’re going to be able to uphold the promise that we made to our teachers, the education system and our retired teachers last session,” he said.

State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., who serves as vice chair on both the Committee on Finance and the Committee on Education, will play a direct role in upholding those promises. Although he said he expects the budget to be a challenge, he also voiced his commitment to education funding.

“With these two what we call ‘powerful’ committees, it will be my priority to keep the levels of funding provided to our schools under last year’s session’s once-in-a-generation reforms, Senate Bill 3,” he said. “This task is made more difficult by the economic downturn that accompanied the pandemic through much of last year.”

Canales said one bill he’s proposing this year relating to severance payments to heads of open-enrollment charter schools will help save taxpayers more money in the long run.

A critic of charter school opacity for months, Canales said more accountability in that area will save

“It ends wasteful, taxpayer funded severance packages at our schools,” he said. “I have three more charter school bills in drafting which are aimed at ostensibly leveling the playing field, increasing transparency and ending conflicts of interest at the charter school. This is a new issue area for my office and one that we’ve spent a considerable amount of time.”

Developing a plan and creating infrastructure to fix Texas students’ lack of access to internet infrastructure is crucial, Canales stressed, especially in the Valley.

The representative said a little over a month ago the largest district in Hidalgo County reported that it was missing over a thousand students, victims of remote learning without the Wi-Fi access to back it up.

“That is devastating,” he said. “But it highlights the importance of not only knowing what we lack, but knowing that we need to improve. Absolutely.”

Canales also thinks more support should go toward helping teachers who are infected with the virus, something he says his House Bill 47 would address.

By presuming district employees caught the virus on campus for insurance purposes, Canales says the state would cover staff and teachers who suffer from it and shift their focus from fear of dealing with the fallout of catching it back to teaching.

“The reality is COVID-19 is such a highly contagious disease that you don’t know where you got it,” he said. “And in the likelihood that you got it in a classroom or at the school is probably the reality. When you’re talking about a teacher that’s in a classroom with upwards of 20 students, every time they meet with those students is potentially a super spreader event. And so to be able to track where a teacher got COVID-19 is almost impossible.”

Not all of this year’s education legislation is so obviously tied to the pandemic. Sen. Lucio says two bills he introduced to increase the ratio of counselors in schools to students and help schools use counselors more effectively.

“I have always made school counselors a priority in the legislature, and now more than ever their services are needed in the school,” he said.

To put it simply, Lucio said, children weathering the storm of sorrow and uncertainty accompanying the pandemic will need counselors.

“The impact and the trauma that these students go through, especially when they see an aunt, a mother, someone that passes because of COVID, is traumatic, very traumatic,” he said. “I shudder to even think that that would happen, but it happens every day.”

As much as those students need emotional support, Lucio said they also need physical support — especially on the dinner table every day.

“The need for food during shutdowns is most important,” he said. “As you know, in the spring when schools shut down, Valley districts were on the forefront of innovating new ways to continue to provide services to the students they educate. Many students lost their access to school lunches when schools closed their doors because of lack of transportation.”

In countless instances, Lucio says local districts stepped up to make sure students got food, using grounded bus fleets and turning cafeterias into distribution centers.

“While this solution kept countless children from going hungry, unfortunately districts had to make deliveries on their own dime and the mileage for those deliveries was not reimbursed,” he said.

Lucio said he intends to propose legislation to fix oversight and provide reimbursement for meal deliveries.


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