Constituent Newsletter Feb. 25, 2012

Fiscal Update: Slow & Steady Growth We are now in the budget intensive part of the annual legislative session. This past week we received new revenue projections that we will use to finalize the budget. Early in the session, we “pencil” in the budget numbers based on the December 2011 projections. These new numbers are more accurate and will allow us to do the final work of balancing the budget. The revised projections show additional growth of about $14 million dollars, bringing our total revenue growth to $422 million. We also learned in the past week that the State would be receiving $23 million as Utah’s portion of the national mortgage lender settlement. Overall, this is good news. It means the State is experiencing slow, but steady growth. Many states are not yet experiencing growth in the post-recession period. We still have more funding requests than money available, so the work of sifting the requests by priority will begin in earnest next week. Some of the top items that are considered likely to receive some of the revenue growth include: 1% pay raises for teachers and state employees, replenishment of the Rainy Day Fund, and higher education pay raises. The majority of the additional revenue will be used to fund growth in public education, Medicaid, and to address the structural deficit of $52 million in on-going programs that were backfilled with one-time money during the recession. Earlier in the session, we passed the base budgets which make up 95% of our nearly $13 billion State budget. The remaining 5% of the budget will be completed in the next 2 weeks as we finalize allocating the $422 million of revenue growth and $23 million from the mortgage lender settlement. There are several important public policy issues being discussed this year, but one that I find particularly intriguing deals with performance pay for school administrators and teachers. Merit or performance pay is the term usually used when discussing the idea of rewarding the good performers and penalizing the bad. In concept the plan is simple; identify criteria that people associate with good teachers and administrators and when the criteria is met apply a reward. However, identifying those criteria has proven to be a challenging task. Previous proposals have met with opposition from various groups and have stalled before ever coming to a vote. This year it seems we might have found a proposal that has the support of the Salt Lake Chamber, Prosperity 20/20, the State Board of Education, UEA, USBA and the PTA. The basic premise of the bill is to address a school’s leadership and then follow that through to the teaching level. Under this bill every administrator would have an annual evaluation which would measure 4 key criteria: a) leadership skills (based on supervisor, teachers, and parent comment), b) student progress indicators (like annual school grade), c) competence and consistency in completing teacher evaluations, and d) other district criteria. All future salary increases would be converted to pay for performance until 15% of an administrator’s direct compensation is tied to their annual performance evaluation. The bill then addresses teaching by having administrators evaluate and rank teachers annually on a scale of 1 to 4. A public report would be compiled for each school listing the number of teachers who fall within each of the evaluation levels each year. Teachers who fall in the bottom half of the evaluation scale would not be eligible for annual salary increases (steps and lanes). Additionally, administrators would have 120 days from the notice of poor evaluation to remediate the teacher or make a decision to terminate the teacher. Repeated poor performance by teachers within a 3-year time- frame could be cause for termination. Obviously, addressing performance pay for administrators and teachers is only the first of many steps toward improving public education, but I think this is an excellent proposal. Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions on any bills. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to represent you on Capitol Hill.