Transcript Prepared By the Clerk of the Legislature Transcriber's Office Education Committee March 14, 2017 [LB568 LB630 LB650] The Committee on Education met at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14, 2017, in Room 1525 of the State Capitol, Lincoln, Nebraska, for the purpose of conducting a public hearing on LB568, LB630, and LB650. Senators present: Mike Groene, Chairperson; Rick Kolowski, Vice Chairperson; Laura Ebke; Steve Erdman; Lou Ann Linehan; Adam Morfeld; Patty Pansing Brooks; and Lynne Walz. Senators absent: None. SENATOR GROENE: (Recorder malfunction)...material that you would like distributed to the committee, please hand in to the page to distribute. We need 12 copies for all committee members and staff. If you need additional copies, please ask the page to make copies for you now. When you begin to testify, please state and spell your name for the record. If everybody remembers that, that's very important because we have transcribers who put all of the spoken testimony into written word and they need to be able to be accurate and spell your name correctly. That is why we ask you to start off by spelling your name, first and last name. Please be concise. It is my request that you limit your testimony to two minutes green light, one minute yellow light. We will be using the light system in front of the testifiers. We will be cutting you off at the...when the red light comes on. It's just a matter of decency that if you're lucky enough to be one of the first, you don't...you want somebody not here at midnight trying to be the last. So be concise in your testimony. Very unique what we do in this state that we have public hearings. So redundancy doesn't help the argument, repeating what somebody else said. We all love public schools. Everybody on this committee loves public schools. This is not an argument if somebody likes or dislikes public schools or public schools are doing their job. Everybody who works at a public school tries to do their job the best they can. Children try to learn. Repeating that schools are great does not help the cause. Try to have something unique to say that can influence the senators in the body of the Unicameral. I'm just telling you this for your own good. If you want to make a point, make it. We'll be here as long as we have to, to hear everybody. The committee members with us today will introduce themselves beginning at the far right. [LB568] SENATOR LINEHAN: Good afternoon. Lou Ann Linehan, District 39 which is western Douglas County. [LB568] SENATOR KOLOWSKI: Senator Rick Kolowski, District 31 in southwest Omaha. Thank you. [LB568] SENATOR EBKE: Laura Ebke. I've got District 32, the four counties to the southwest of here-- Jefferson, Thayer, Saline, and Fillmore. [LB568] 1 Transcript Prepared By the Clerk of the Legislature Transcriber's Office Education Committee March 14, 2017 SENATOR ERDMAN: Steve Erdman, District 47, ten counties in the Panhandle and I'll spare from saying all of them. [LB568] SENATOR WALZ: Lynne Walz, District 15, all of Dodge County. [LB568] SENATOR GROENE: And I believe, I haven't been told otherwise, Senator Pansing Brooks from Lincoln and Senator Adam Morfeld from Lincoln also will be joining us. To my immediate left is our legal counsel LaMont Rainey. To my far right is the clerk I mentioned earlier who you hand your sheet to, Kristina McGovern. The pages are Lexi Richmond and Sam Baird. They're both students at the University of Nebraska. Please remember that senators may come and go during our hearing as they may have bills to introduce in other committees. That's probably why one or two of the senators are missing now. I'd also like a remind our committee members to speak directly into the microphone. Once you're done testifying, we've...you're done. I mean we make mistakes here, too, but if we ask you a question and you don't know the answer, do not turn around and ask somebody in the audience that you know knows the answer. Just say I believe somebody behind me is going to be testifying and they will be able answer that question better than I. That's the best way to do it and that saves time. So do not try to answer questions you do not have the answer to. We will try, as a committee, to make sure we save the technical questions to the Department of Education representatives and hopefully when administrators or somebody that we know has expertise in an area, we'll try to reserve our questions for those folks instead of trying to put individuals on the spot just for interest of time. But otherwise, we're ready to start. Senator Erdman will start introducing LB568, change provisions related to temporary teaching certificates. [LB568] SENATOR ERDMAN: (Exhibits 1-6) Thank you, Senator Groene. Thank you, committee, for hearing what I have to say. The light is a lot better over here, Mike, Senator Groene. So my name is Steve Erdman, S-t-e-v-e E-r-d-m-a-n. I come to you today with LB568. LB568 is what I call a temporary teaching...a substitute teaching certificate. As I was campaigning this fall and talking to the superintendents in my district, we came to the conclusion...they came to the conclusion and shared with me the fact that they have a real difficult time finding substitute teachers. And shortly after I was elected they sent a letter describing the short availability of substitutes and asked if there was something we could do. They sent a letter requesting that we look at a provision that would ease up some of the restrictions as far as the qualifications go and also extend the number of days that a person can substitute in a district. We have a very small pool of substitute teachers in western Nebraska. I don't know whether that's the same it is in eastern Nebraska. So henceforth, that's where the idea came from. So they're having difficulty finding substitute teachers, and in the Panhandle of Nebraska we don't have a lot of people who have a college education looking for a substitute teacher's job and so consequently there's a shortage there. Because of this, they ask to look at...asked me to look at three or four other states and the way they do their substitute teacher requirements, and the state that made the most sense to me 2 Transcript Prepared By the Clerk of the Legislature Transcriber's Office Education Committee March 14, 2017 was Wyoming. And we modeled this substitute teacher certificate after the state of Wyoming. I'm handing out to you...there will be an amendment that's coming along and it's just to clarify that this is a substitute teacher bill. And there's also a letter from Rick Myles. He's the superintendent of schools in Scottsbluff and also a letter from Jeff West. He's from ESU 13 in Scottsbluff. On the backside of the one letter there's a list of the some of the superintendents who contacted me and asked me to do this for them. And so as we proceed to go forward, it was my intention that we would offer these people the opportunity to be a substitute teacher without 60 hours of college education. And that's one of the requirements now and right now the requirement is that they can't teach more than 45 days in one district. The department has, as I found out yesterday, has amended some of their regulations and they're going to ease up their standards on the 45 days and they're going to extend that to 90. I just found that out yesterday. But it doesn't ease up the standard on what the qualifications for a substitute teacher are. So if you want to get a lot of people to come out and testify on a bill just do something to education and, as you can see, the room will fill up. And so what will probably happen here is there will be probably a couple of us will testify in support of this bill and then they'll be numerous people telling us why we can't do this. And that seems the way it goes here. If it wasn't their idea, it's not too important. But I can tell you that those 20 superintendents on the backside of that page that are from those rural schools--Alliance, Banner County, Bayard, Bridgeport, Chadron, Crawford, Creek Valley, Garden County, Gering, Gordon-Rushville, Hay Springs, Hemingford, Kimball, Leyton, Minatare, Mitchell, Potter-Dix, Scottsbluff, Sidney, Sioux County--have a problem. And the problem is they don't have substitute teachers. And so when I began to look at this and I begin to see the significance of the problems that we have, the bill...what the bill basically says is that a substitute teacher must be 21 years of age, have a high school diploma, and then they will be trained in the district, district training in the district for at least 24 hours, and then they must be observed in 10 hours' classroom time in each subclass of a school that they're going to sub in, whether it's the junior high, grade school, or high school. And once they've done that, they also must pass a background check.