Some Kentucky superintendents of schools say the Republican House budget doesn't make the grade when it comes to education funding.

They talked about it today in Scott County.

They say that budget plan has $42 million less than what could be used for teacher raises.

This is a great opportunity for superintendents in central Kentucky to really come together and share our common concerns that we have with the House budget as we're going into this session and trying to figure out how we're going to utilize those dollars to truly impact what's going on in the classrooms.

It really was disheartening for me to see when the budget came out and then to compute the numbers and see what we could provide for teacher compensation and employee compensation.

But then to see that there was specific references in the budget to district mergers, district closures.

If we weren't able to provide for adequate hiring increases, improvements in hiring, the first year of the budget, we would be able to provide a 2% raise for our staff.

And that's if we did not consider all the inflationary issues that we know people are dealing with in their private homes.

We're dealing with as well.

Year two, we could do no raise.

As the budget stands.

It really gives me three three options.

One would be to offer a 1% raise for all of our staff.

The other would be to cut programs so that we could potentially add additional raises.

Or the third is to raise local tax dollars.

And the challenge that I have with raising local tax dollars, which I think other superintendents would agree, is if you look at the state budget, it is anticipated that we will have as much as a $5.2 billion excess budget at the end of next year.

And, you know, those are taxpayer dollars.

And I feel like those dollars, a lot of those dollars can be utilized to go back to those local communities so that we truly can influence raises for our teachers and other staff.

The most important factor in student achievement is quality of the teacher in the classroom.

And in order to get get quality folks in the classroom, you have to put together a compensation package that that that entices them to be there.

And we've seen that that erode over the past several years.

Locally, we've tried to give raises as we've been as we've been able to, but most of that has been on the backs of our local taxpayers.

And we want to make sure that we see that we advocate for funding for that at the local funding from the state level that will provide those increases in general fund revenues that we need to make increases in teacher compensation.

I don't want to speak for my superintendent, fellow superintendents, but I believe that we are stuck in a position where if we say nothing about what this does, especially for employee compensation, that we're going to be in a situation where later there's going to be confusion about if this is what it did, why didn't you say something sooner?

The House Republican budget plan, House Bill six, passed the full House earlier this month, just a couple of weeks ago.

It's now in possession of the Senate where it's waiting for consideration.