2017-03-11 Update
Legislative
Update
Introduction - I’ll admit, it was nice to
have a day Friday to catch up on “paperwork” and scheduling. The
four days at the legislature were filled with sessions and mostly with
committee work. With over 140 bills to hear, the committee chair tells us
we are behind schedule, so I can only look forward to longer weeks in the
very near future.
Thank heavens for the people who give me rides
to and from the legislature. That half hour drive provides a
great chance to talk, to share ideas, and to de-compress the
days.
House Calendars - You should have access
to the things we do.
Tuesday, March
7, 2017
Thusday, March
9, 2017
Events Calendars - Check out the
following events at the events calendar on the left of this page or use
this link.
Events
This week in the
House - We are still at that stage when most bills
simply get referred to committee, but each of them must be mentioned and
then referred. It’s how the bill process works. The House received
some 1600 bills for this session and not to refer them to committee for a
first pass would extend the session into
infinity.
This week in the Education
Committee
We heard several bills in the Education
and Cultural Affairs Committee and hand several work sessions. The
bill’s initiation presentation is heard - as makes sense - in a hearing.
The discussion and vote comes in a work session. The distance between the
two gives legislators a chance to think about the merits or liabilities of
a bill. But, it also means keeping ti all straight, and because most
everything I do is digital, it means lots and lots of folders in my
in-box.
One of the more interesting bills was presented by
Representative Dick Farnsworth. It concerned a bill to create a fund which
would promote universal Pre-K and Kindergarten classes for all students in
Maine. Despite the fact that this was supposed to have been in place by
2017, the original mandate has lapsed. It was interesting and
informative to hear the range of testimony - and especially that testimony
from a Sheriff in Maine who presented clear facts and figures on the
positive impact of Pre-K and Kindergarten classes.
A second
bill that I found interesting was LD 570 - An Act to Create a Maine
Institute of Technology, a concept draft presented by Senate Shenna
Bellows. At some point, we need to realize that the world of
the future will be tied to how we research and use technology - and we
need to realize that students in Maine who want to pursue those careers
already need to go out of state of much of their instruction. I also
believe that we spend a great deal of time looking to the south of New
England for support and markets, and that we would be better served to
look to the north and east for support and markets. I do
believe that when we see the potentials of connections to Montreal and the
Maritime provinces, we will find that we sit right in the middle of a
great demographic - Northern New England and Southern Canada. I
think Senator Bellows is onto something - because every dollar we put into
education yields a 12-1 return on
investment.
(Photograph by Peter Lik)
Reflections
At some point, I wish
there were agreement and clarity about the Governor’s budget and about
the role of education in the state. I wish there were clarity and
agreement about the role of testing in determining student
success.
There are times when it feels as though our good
intentions undo themselves, and that by doing less we might be
accomplishing more. All too often we pass rules and mandates and
then do not give local districts the funds to accomplish those mandates.
All too often we pass rules to ensure yearly testing and
then don’t spend the time assessing for ourselves what those tests mean
- even though in delivering those tests we take the students out of
instruction for up to ten days. All too often we tie successful
testing to teacher salary - and the test results from last year are quite
disturbingly low.
This weekend, I’ll be researching the
work done in Norway, known for educational efficacy but not a great deal
of educational testing. Interestingly enough another of the bills we
hear this week had to do with mandating an hour of physical activity for
all students, a bill opposed by the Department of Education. I asked
that they research European elementary schools, which are still called by
the name “gymnasium.”
Finally, I did get a chacne to present my bill to incentivize legislative carpooling. It was well recieved and was covered in teh local paper.