For weeks, Louisiana's legislative leadership publicly flirted with the possibility of upping K-12 teacher salaries by $1,000, hedging that commitment on the recognition of additional tax collections for the upcoming fiscal year.
Those revenues materialized — but the pay raises did not.
The Senate Finance Committee on Monday released their mark-up of the state's multibillion-dollar spending plan for the budget year beginning July 1 with spending bumps for higher education, juvenile justice and dozens of other favored pets projects.
Lawmakers in the upper chamber had the rare opportunity to divvy up hundreds of millions of dollars in better-than-expected tax revenues after the state last week forecasted $355 million in excess funds for the current fiscal year and $320 million in additional collections for the next fiscal year.
The House-approved budget already included pay raises of $800 for elementary and secondary school teachers and $400 for support staff like bus drivers and cafeteria workers — with the widespread expectation of an even higher raise pending additional revenues.
That belief was further fueled by a press release from legislative leadership in late April, which lauded teachers for their sacrifices during the coronavirus pandemic and teased a larger bump in pay for the state's public education workforce.
"Most teachers worked through the pandemic and continued educating our kids through this crisis," Senate Finance Committee Chair Bodi White, a Central Republican, wrote in the April release. "We felt it was important to recognize their commitment with a $1,000 increase for teachers and a $500 increase for the support workers.”
Those hikes, which would amount to $20 million in additional funding, didn't make it into the budget released in committee Monday. Senate President Page Cortez, a Lafayette Republican, acknowledged there was "a push by some of us to enhance it," but said there's no plan to look for additional money this year to up that number. He said pay raises are likely in the cards next year.
Cortez noted that the approved pay bumps are double what Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, had proposed in his initial budget, an opening bid teachers union at the time called insulting.
Louisiana’s roughly 50,000 public school teachers are paid an average of $50,923 per year, which is about $4,000 below the average set by the Southern Regional Education Board. Edwards has said he wants to close that gap by the time he leaves office in 2024.
The Senate's proposed spending blueprint largely remains in line with the budget passed weeks earlier by the House. In addition to pay raises for K-12 teachers and support staff, the $37 billion plan ups salaries for college faculty, prison guards, juvenile justice workers and other rank-and-file state employees.
The popular Taylor Opportunity Program for Students would fully cover tuition costs for all eligible college students and the separate need-based Go Grant aid program for college students would also grow larger. The daily board rate for foster parents would also get a bump.
The Senate added $10.5 million to a tuition aid program for community college students and $18 million for an array of other higher education programs. Those include dollars for the university agricultural centers, a student athlete health and wellness study at Louisiana State University, equipment for LSU’s medical school in Shreveport, improvements at Southern University and turf replacement at Northwestern State University.
Senate lawmakers on Monday also steered $355 million in better-than-expected tax revenue from the current fiscal year to make the first of several payments owed to the federal government for upgrades made to the flood protection system across five parishes in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina.
Senators also added dozens of earmarks for favored projects in their districts, including $12 million in road projects in Lafayette, the city where Cortez lives, and $2 million to the athletics foundation in White's hometown of Central. Other dollars would go to recreational facilities in Jefferson Parish, a skate park in Ruston, fire departments in Ascension Parish, the River Road African American Museum and the National World War II Museum
Combined with other budget measures, the state would spend more than $42 billion on programs and services in the 2021-22 financial year. Spending on legislative and judicial operations, allocated through separate budget bills, would grow larger, and judges would get another year of a multiyear pay raise.