The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated several education issues that have plagued classrooms for years: a teaching shortage, student disciplinary issues and a lack of student engagement.

These issues have become top priorities for lawmakers in recent years, and educators hope the passage of two omnibus education bills through the state legislature will push schools a few steps closer to a more sustainable teaching environment.

“There’s many good things we’re doing here,” said Education Committee Ranking Member Sen. Eric Berthel, R-Watertown. “There’s a lot of good work from the Education Committee — a combination of bills that all had public hearings — and all had wide support out of the committee.”

House Bill 5436, an act concerning educator certification, teachers, paraeducators and mandated reporter requirements, and House Bill 5437, an act concerning education mandate relief, school discipline and disconnected youth, now head to Gov. Ned Lamont’s desk to be signed into law.

[RELATED: CT bills on teacher certification, mandated reporting pass House]

Both pieces of legislation passed through the senate without much opposition, with H.B. 5436 as part of a late night consent agenda, and the passage of H.B. 5437 coming after a 30-minute discussion and question-and-answer session between Berthel and committee co-chair Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford.

But regardless of these efforts, teachers across the state say bigger changes are yet to come.

“While the legislature took several small steps to improve the teaching profession, there was no bold action that will address the significant problems facing public education,” said Kate Dias, the president of the Connecticut Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the state, adding that the legislature “refused to make the financial commitments needed to address the ongoing teacher shortage crisis and did nothing to improve recruitment or retention, increase starting salaries or acknowledge the pandemic sacrifices made by out teachers.”

Teacher certification, mandated reporting

House Bill 5436 garnered strong support throughout the 2024 legislative session, with several advocates saying changes to the teacher certification model were a long time coming. 

The process hasn’t been changed since 1998.

The bill not only simplifies the pathway toward professional status by eliminating a step in the existing three-tiered system but also makes it easier for educators to teach at different grade levels. 

“This is a giant step in the right direction for modernizing our certification laws, breaking down barriers and recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce,” Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker said.

“This bill represents considerable consensus across varied stakeholder groups —including the CT Innovation Cohort, the Connecticut Educator Certification Council, state officials, district administrators, teachers, advocates, business leaders, and the higher education community — who have all come together to modernize our teacher pipeline for the benefit of Connecticut students,” said the New Teacher Track, a coalition of educators and advocacy groups.

Currently, teachers must obtain their initial certification, which is valid for three years, then obtain a provisional certificate that’s valid for eight years. Teachers can apply for their professional certificate after the provisional certificate and after “30 school months of successful appropriate experience in a Connecticut public or approved nonpublic school under the provisional educator certificate” and additional course requirements, according to the state Department of Education.

The new legislation extends the validation of an initial certificate to 10 years and would essentially remove the provisional certificate tier by July 2025, allowing a teacher to qualify for professional status after completing at least 50 school months of teaching, a teacher education and mentoring program and either hold a master’s degree in the subject or completed an alternative pathway approved by the state.

An initial certificate can now be issued to anyone who successfully completed an educator preparation program approved by the state Board of Education, is an educator from another state and meets state requirements, or “presents a combination of education and experience that the state board determines is the equivalent of the education and experience required,” according to language in the bill. 

The legislation also has opened the door to make the pathway easier for school support staff and paraeducators to become certified teachers.

Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, co-chair of the Education Committee, argued that streamlining the state’s teacher certification system will help address shortfalls in the workforce following the COVID-19 pandemic as well fostering a more diverse pool of educators.

“I am glad my legislative colleagues unanimously recognized this need for simplification and increased accessibility to teacher certification — especially in the districts that would most benefit from it,” Currey said in a written statement to The Connecticut Mirror.

Other changes in House Bill 5436 include an expansion to the grades that elementary school educators can teach, where instead of being limited to first through sixth grade, teachers can also educate children in pre-K and kindergarten. Educators with qualifications for seventh through 12th grade could also teach students as young as fourth grade under language in the bill.

To maintain these new standards and develop further improvements, the legislation also created the Connecticut Educator Preparation and Certification Board, which will “be responsible for modernizing and aligning educator preparation and certification to ensure that policies are optimized to attract and retain effective and diverse professionals for employment in the state’s public schools.”

The board will be made up of four public school teachers, three representatives from an educator preparation program approved by the state Board of Education, three local administrators, a representative from the Increasing Educator Diversity Policy Oversight Council and the education and early childhood commissioners.

The group will “have the authority to develop standards and proposals for regulations and legislation relating to educator preparation and certification,” the bill said.

“This board will bring the expertise of skilled and veteran educators, together with the State Board of Education, to continuously develop standards and proposals resulting in long-term, meaningful change,” Russell-Tucker said. “HB 5436 gives us the path forward.”

House Bill 5436 expanded the Aspiring Educators Diversity Scholarship Program in hopes of recruiting diverse students from alliance districts into the teaching profession.

Another proposal intended to recruit and retain more diverse educators would have raised the starting salaries to $60,000 for educators and $45,000 for paraeducators. Despite passing out of the Education Committee, the proposal ultimately died and was stripped from the final bill.

[RELATED: CT bills would fight teacher shortage by changing pay, certification]

“With a growing state surplus, this was the perfect time to provide the funding and supports that would allow our education system and students to thrive,” Dias said. “Instead, the lack of action will continue to add to the dismantling of our public education system, promote dissatisfaction and further drive teachers out of the profession they love.”

The bill would also change mandated reporting requirements for teachers. Lawmakers said many teachers are calling the state’s Department of Children and Families to make reports out of fear of losing their jobs even if they are unsure rather than because they believe kids are being abused or neglected.

Educators place about 40% of calls to DCF’s Careline, and only a small percentage of those are substantiated reports, Currey said. The bill would add in “good faith” language to mandated reporter requirements, meaning that teachers will only have to call DCF if they believe there is abuse or neglect.

It also allows them to ask questions before calling DCF — for example, if a child comes to school with a bruised knee, the teacher can ask what happened. If the child says they fell off their bike, and the teacher believes them, they don’t have to report the incident.

School discipline 

House Bill 5437 touched on several aspects of school safety and discipline, including decreasing the number of days a child can be suspended, developing standards in regards to school climate surveys and a section addressing and requiring new annual data on disconnected youth.

Effective this July, for young learners between kindergarten and second grade, out-of-school suspensions will be capped at five days, a decrease from current legislation that allows up to 10 days.

[RELATED: With CT school suspensions and expulsions rising, bill aims to help]

The bill changes existing language that describes a child’s behavior as “violent or sexual in nature that endangers persons” to “causes physical harm” and will furthermore require school administrations to provide K-2 students “trauma-informed and developmentally appropriate services that align with any behavioral intervention plan, individualized education program, or Section 504 plan when the student returns to school immediately after the suspension and consider whether to convene a planning and placement team meeting to evaluate whether the student may need special education or related services.”

This legislation also limits in-school suspensions to five days, instead of 10, for all students.

“I’ll just say from experience being an educator, when we do suspend a child … many [of those] students need extra support. These children are the ones who need academic support more than any, and keeping them out of school for 10 days, we just felt that as just a little too much,” McCrory said. “We want to make sure the proper supports are in place for that child to be successful when they get back into our schools.”

House Bill 5437 also continues to build on work from last year regarding school climate standards and will require standards for a school climate survey and improvement plan.

“The Social and Emotional Learning and School Climate Advisory Collaborative … has numerous responsibilities related to fostering a positive school climate, including developing a statewide school climate survey and a model positive school climate policy,” the bill reads. “For the survey, the standards must address collecting diversity, equity, and inclusion data and how to reduce disparities in data collection between school districts.”

The bill also builds on a report released last year that concluded that more than 63,000 young adults were disconnected and 56,000 students in Connecticut were at risk between 2021 and 2022.

The bill requires the Connecticut Preschool through Twenty and Workforce Information Network, also known as P20 WIN, “to develop a plan to establish a statewide data intermediary to provide technical support, create data-sharing agreements, and build and maintain the infrastructure needed to share data between nonprofit organizations serving disconnected youth.”

Currey pointed to the need for more statewide collaboration in creating greater need for youth engagement in schools.

“HB 5436 and HB 5437 are positive public policy steps toward that increased engagement,” Currey said.

Luke Feeney and Ginny Monk contributed reporting.