By HILLARY CHERRY
Press Secretary, State Senator Ryan Mishler’s Office

A bill authored by State Sen. Ryan Mishler (R-Bremen) to reward Indiana’s best teachers and reduce red tape for schools passed the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development today by a 7-3 vote.

Indiana schools spend only 57.5 percent of their budgets on student instruction, according to the most recent data from the Office of Management and Budget. Mishler’s plan would shift additional education dollars toward the classroom instead of overhead by increasing pay for effective teachers.

“Strengthening education in Indiana is one of the legislature’s top goals every year,” Mishler said. “One of the most important aspects of helping children receive a high-quality education is making sure our schools are staffed with great teachers and those teachers are fully supported.”

As passed in committee, Senate Bill 566 would:

• Make more teachers eligible for annual stipends under Indiana’s School Performance Grant Program, which provides money exclusively for teacher pay;
• Offer local schools more freedom from state mandates by allowing all school corporations to implement the “Innovation Network Schools” model currently used by Indianapolis Public Schools;
• Streamline student testing by replacing ISTEP+ and IREAD-3 with one testing product;
• Bring more Hoosiers with high-demand job skills into the teaching profession by allowing individuals to receive a teacher’s license if they graduated college with a 2.5 GPA in a science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) field and a minor in education;
• Provide school corporations more flexibility to offer higher pay to teachers with master’s degrees in education or the specific subject area in which they teach; and
• Improve procedures for teacher evaluations and collective bargaining.

Mishler said that under SB 566, school corporations can choose to make up to half of their teachers’ School Performance Grant stipends part of their base salary, providing a permanent increase instead of a one-time bonus.

The text of SB 566 can be found by visiting https://iga.in.gov/legislative/2015/bills/senate/566#.

The bill will now be recommitted to the Senate Committee on Appropriations for further consideration.