What educators want from the upcoming legislative session

We will hear what the education community hopes will come out of the upcoming Legislative session.
Marisol Garcia, President of the Arizona Education Association, joined “Arizona Horizon” to talk about what the Arizona Teacher Union hopes to see in the upcoming Legislative session.

“We need to talk about funding, we are losing teachers at a drastic rate at this point,” Garcia said, “…we always want to talk about the vouchers, the fact that they are crippling our budget, and then we really want to have good conversations about how do we keep teachers…not just about paying for them, but what learning conditions can be created.”

Garcia explained how they have dealt with a steady budget for the past few years, and it would be very difficult for the schools if they face additional budget cuts.

“For us, we have to have these holistic conversations on how to fix public schools, and the funding mechanisms that we currently have,” Garcia said, “…what we currently have is for each district to decide, and we don’t know why we need to veer from that.”

Garcia emphasized how she wishes the state would commit more to early childhood education and to have fully-funded kindergartens.

“We don’t have that in the state, one of the few states in the country that doesn’t fully fund kindergarten,” Garcia explained, “…every longitudinal data set says that more students have earlier on their literacy rates, their exploring rates, everything goes up.”

There are numerous issues that school districts in Arizona are facing, including class sizes, number of educators, and number of safety professionals in the buildings to keep students and teachers safe.

“We can think about raises, we also need to think about health care,” Garcia said, “…everyone’s dealing with health care issues. Across the state, teachers are seeing two to three percent raises every year, but then their health care comes in and eats up four percent, so we need to have good conversations.”