LAFAYETTE – It doesn’t sound as if Indiana lawmakers are arguing about whether the state’s teachers are due a raise.
It does look, as the General Assembly enters a budget-making session in 2019, as if they don’t have unified idea about how to deal with concerns about teacher shortages and a situation that the U.S. Department of Education statistics shows Indiana teachers are making less, when paychecks are adjusted for inflation, than they were a decade ago.
“This can’t keep going on,” state Rep. Sheila Klinker, a Lafayette Democrat and retired teacher, said.
The past week featured the players staking out territory on teacher pay, with Gov. Eric Holcomb promising to get education increases into the next two-year budget – due by the end of the 2019 session – but waiting until the 2021 session to come up with a framework and the millions of dollars it will take to improve salaries.
Meanwhile, Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, called on Holcomb and Statehouse leaders not to limp along until 2021 without addressing reasons why teachers are bailing out. “We expect action in 2019,” she said during a Monday press conference intended to answer the governor’s discussion of a more deliberate approach.
Where do those in Greater Lafayette’s delegation stand? Here’s what lawmakers with districts that include part of Tippecanoe County are thinking, three weeks out from the start of the 2019 session.
► Rep. Tim Brown, a Crawfordsville Republican, holds considerable sway on the question – on any question of budget-making, for that matter, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Brown is still recovering from a Sept. 12 motorcycle crash, when an SUV pulled into the path of his Harley-Davidson on U.S. 2 near Mackinac Island. After 3½ weeks in a Michigan hospital and then a stay at a rehabilitation hospital in Indiana, Brown said this week that he’s using a cane for tightness in his right hip, “but otherwise getting around pretty well.” He said he plans to be ready for the 2019 session, with Rep. Todd Huston, R-Fishers, helping during the first few months to run the Ways and Means Committee when he needs to be out for rehab appointments.