Negotiators on the most multibillion dollar executive branch budget have come to an agreement while other budgetary matters remain.

The House and Senate differed on those spending plans, and talks have been ongoing to reconcile differences.

We talked about the budget last night on Kentucky.

Tonight in an appropriate place, one of the legislative committee rooms in the Frankfort Capitol annex.

I asked our panel of lawmakers about Governor Andy Beshear, his request for a pay raise for teachers and whether that's likely to happen.

I think it's a very difficult step to take.

I was here as a last time, as was Senator Webb, that we did teacher raises and one of the it was actually my first budget session.

And one of the things that sticks in my memory very dramatically is a school superintendent coming in and saying, look, when you guys do raises because of how the formula pushes, it is different.

And he showed me just in the five districting, I have five school districts in my Senate district how it hit different ones differently.

And for some it actually netted them money and for others it cost them money to do the raises that we mandated and the nature of of the seek formula which we use to fund our schools is it started with a constitutional provision to provide a common system of schooling through the rose decision at the Supreme Court through, Kyra four for education reform that gave us the Sikh formula.

So this is a constitutionally based funding formula, and any deviation from it begins to skew us towards being out of constitutional compliance.

And so both from the practical side as well as the constitutional side, I struggle for how we make this happen.

I share the chairman's perspective, and I think the challenge know, before I came I only had Fayette County, so I know how Fayette County did things and you kind of get outside and realize it's not the same in these counties that do have different struggles.

Their priorities are sometimes different.

And I think we have to look at the context as well.

The whole piece of the education puzzle, it is transportation is per pupil funding.

It is lots of things we do on on large list or other things we do on investments for education that all ties into how we want to give some support to educational system.

So you can't you can't focus on one without look in the context of the whole.

But I think we're trying to do a pretty good job addressing that.

Yeah.

So Representative Stevenson, we've heard from a lot of the members of the education community, the K groups, about that teacher pay along with student discipline issues, have been things that have really contributed to the teacher shortage on the ranking of teacher pay.

Do you think that should be the thing that state lawmakers put some emphasis and focus on?

I absolutely do.

And I think while I love our teachers, I think it should be across the board.

I think it should be all school employees because cafeteria workers and janitors and bus drivers, you know, they help make our schools go as well.

So I don't want to leave them out of this conversation.

And however, you know, I think it's important that we really stop and think about that, because we know that last time when we just gave money through C, only one single district in all of Kentucky gave a comparable raise as to what state employees got.

So I think that when we're looking at, you know, it not being equal, I think it's only going to be equal if it comes from us.

And we know that the governor had proposed 11% across the board for all school employees, and that would put us right in the middle of states with starting an average teacher pay.

So we can't keep wanting and saying that we want to attract the best and the brightest and then retain those teachers here if we're not going to pay them.

As you hear, we're losing teachers to Tennessee, we're losing teachers to Ohio, West Virginia all the time because they are paying a higher salary.

I have a district that borders two other states and we lose teachers.

So we've got to really focus on on attraction, retention and paying them a living wage so that that would be a priority of mine.

And and, you know, retired state employees, I mean, we hear a lot from them.

I would like to wave a wand and help those folks.

But but I think, you know, overall, as far as the executive branch goes, we've got to give them regardless who's governor and about.

This has always been my budget philosophy, regardless of who's in the executive branch leadership.

And you've got to give them the flexibility, necessary government expense spending and for economic development, for disasters, for things of that nature.

I think we're going to have pools of money for those things.

But but, you know, we have east and west Kentucky.

The experience in the last couple of years just I want to make sure there's a safety net there and the governor's got whoever the governor is has the flexibility to respond.

And we've still got people suffering in both next of the woods.

And I made a promise, not forget about them.

Yeah.

Today, budget negotiators announced an agreement on the executive branch budget that includes 3% pay raises for state workers each year of the upcoming biennium and more money for K through 12 funding, school transportation and higher education priorities.

More budget related matters have yet to be decided, though lawmakers are at a current impasse on the judicial and transportation budgets and road plan.

We're going to track those negotiations as the session winds down in the coming days.