116 days remain in the 87th Regular Legislative Session.

Speaker Dade Phelan released House committee assignments today. Chairman Harold Dutton (D-Houston) will lead the House Public Education Committee, while Chairman Greg Bonnen (R-Friendswod) will be responsible for leading the House Appropriations Committee.

The following individuals were appointed to the House Public Education and House Appropriations Committees.

Additionally, Morgan Meyer (R-) will be chairing the House Ways & Means Committee, while Briscoe Cain (R-Houston) will chair the House Elections Committee. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) will be chairing the powerful Calendars Committee, and Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth) will chair the Local & Consent Committee. Chris Paddie (R-) will chair the State Affairs Committee.

You can access the full list by committee here, or the list by member here. If your district is represented by any of the above listed individuals, please consider reaching out to them to congratulate them on their appointment and offer your assistance as they work to learn and make decisions about matters important to their local school districts.

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick announced Senate committee appointments last month. Those can be found here.

For the next few weeks, we're going to do a deep-dive on each of our legislative priorities and provide a one-pager with some talking points and food for thought on each one. This first week, we're looking at COVID-19's impact on public education.

We know that many students statewide have experienced learning losses during the pandemic, and that applies to those who have resumed in-person learning, those who are still learning remotely, and those who have not returned to school. Schools need the resources necessary to close the gaps, address these learning losses, and get students back on track.

Governor Greg Abbott delivered his State of the State address Monday evening and reported that Texas is “brimming with promise”. In his remarks, the Governor announced that he is designating five items as emergency items (meaning legislation may be passed on these topics during the first 60 days of the session, while all other topics must wait until after March 12). Those items include: expanding broadband internet access, discouraging the defunding of police, fixing the bail system, election integrity, and civil liability protections for businesses open during the pandemic.

As you may recall, the emergency items from two years ago included school finance reform, teacher pay raises, school safety, property tax reform, and disaster response.

Governor Abbott spoke of the meaningful pay raises given to Texas teachers last session, and specifically cited the figures of an average raise of $3,800 for those working five years or less, and an average of $5,200 for teachers with more than five years of experience. We know not all districts saw that kind of increase though, and you can find those details here.

The Governor said that “This session we must continue to fund education as we promised.”

He also spoke in favor of bolstering civics education in schools, to “ensure that every child learns the values of freedom, good governance, and patriotism.”

Governor Abbott spoke about accelerating the vaccine process and the importance of mental health. Sometimes the things that go unsaid speak as loudly as the words that are spoken, and his remarks included no mention of property taxes, public advocacy, school choice, or a myriad of other topics that simply didn’t come up in this biennial address.

You can read the Governor’s remarks in their entirety here.

On January 29, the Comptroller certified the preliminary findings of the School and Appraisal Districts’ Property Value Study for Tax Year 2020. You can see your district's results here.

TEA will likely begin to use these certified preliminary findings to replace the estimates currently in use. Since these values grew by about 6.2% (compared to the 4% applied in the estimates), it is likely the state aid payments will decrease and recapture will increase statewide (with varying results in individual districts). Estimated adopted tax rates will be replaced with data from the appraisal district and tax collections will also be replaced with district-submitted PEIMS data.

A district’s Property Value Study results may differ from the County Appraisal District values certified to the district back in July for several possibly reasons, including: different optional exemptions, value protests, or the treatment of the value subject to the frozen levy. Values can also differ if the CAD fails the Property Value Study and is therefore assigned state values.

This year, 93 school districts received state values and 150 were in a CAD that was in year one or two of grace. If your district needs to protest the value, they have 40 calendar days from the day the value was certified to do so. You can learn more about how to protest here.

To see how your district will be impacted, you can replace your current estimated district property value study values with the results posted on the Comptroller's website in your state aid template, or use the newly posted version 9 of the state aid template, which has bee updated with the new values. You may also want to update your district’s tax collection assumptions in your district’s revenue estimates, as you have likely collected the majority of property taxes for the year by this point in time, or certainly enough to evaluate trends and update assumptions.

The Texas House and Texas Senate did not meet this week. They will meet again Tuesday, February 9.

The Senate Finance Committee will meet on Monday, February 8, for an organizational hearing and to hear an overview of Senate Bill 1, beginning the appropriations process. Then, on Monday, February 22, the committee will take up Article III, relating to public education.

If you haven't already done so, please bookmark this link to our Legislator Profile Book. This link will allow you to easily access school finance details about the districts represented by every member of the Texas Legislature, along with maps of the school districts in each legislative district. It's a resource for our membership that we hope you will find useful. We're also going to be updating that book with key talking points and information as the session evolves, so it's a handy place to find information.