Legal problems hinder teacher tuition bill
By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer
A technical glitch has killed a plan to reimburse Hawai'i teachers for their college tuition and provide a valuable recruiting tool to officials scrounging to fill an estimated 1,500 teaching vacancies each year.
Gov. Ben Cayetano vetoed a popular bill that would have reimbursed tuition dollars to teachers who came out of Hawai'i university programs and stayed to teach in public schools here for at least six years.
While Cayetano supported the intent of the bill, he noted constitutional problems with its title, "Student loans for teachers."
The tuition reimbursement would have to be available regardless of whether tuition bills were paid through student loans, but state law requires that the title of a bill match its content. "I hope they introduce it next year and then pass it," Cayetano said.
Public schools hire an estimated 600 to 700 new teachers each year from in-state colleges, according to the Department of Education's most recent Teacher Employment Report. Many of those teachers would have been eligible for the tuition reimbursement program.
Teachers and lawmakers were dismayed that technical problems undid a bill that had been seen as a way to help ease the state's critical teachers shortage. Many thought the bill would have encouraged graduates to stay in state and in the teaching profession.
"We're battling a serious teachers shortage and are shaking the trees every which way we can to find teachers right now," said Joan Husted, executive director of the Hawai'i State Teachers Association.
Legislators say they plan to bring the bill back next session. It generated little controversy and had widespread support — including the governor's — during the session.
Sen. Norman Sakamoto, D16th (Moanalua, Salt Lake), said language could be added to make the program retroactive to this year. "That way nobody loses out," said Sakamoto, chair of the Senate Education Committee. "It's as if it had passed this year."
The constitutional problems with the bill cropped up toward the end of the Legislative session, Rep. Ken Ito said.
The bill started with an idea for student-loan forgiveness, then grew to tuition reimbursement for public and private college students.
By the time lawmakers realized that the "student loans" title might bring about a veto, it was too late in the session to find another bill, titled "Relating to Education," that they could have used to tack on the tuition reimbursement language.
"As the bill went along in the process, things started to get added in," Ito said. "It got bigger and bigger. We could have inserted that bill into one with a broader title, but we couldn't find a vehicle at that stage."
The attorney general's office pointed out the problem to the governor, and he stuck by the state law on the language and titles of bills.
"If you let this through, then what?" asked Kim Murakawa, the governor's spokeswoman.
Education official face a number of recruiting pressures: a national shortage of teachers, a declining number of education graduates from local universities and the new federal "No Child Left Behind" Act that requires a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by 2005.
"The pressure is going to be enormous on the system to meet those demands," Husted said. "This would have helped."
Many other school districts offer teachers moving expenses, bonuses or student-loan forgiveness as a recruiting tool. Other states often send representatives from their schools here to recruit from Hawai'i's pool of ethnically and racially diverse graduates.
In turn, Hawai'i education officials visit job fairs in states such as California, Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Pennsylvania to fill vacancies.
Sande Arakaki, a special education teacher since 1980, said she is concerned about the state's difficulty in hiring new special education teachers and in improving working conditions to keep experienced teachers in the classroom. "It worries me that after I leave, I don't know who is going to take my place," she said. "It's an overwhelming problem."
John Nippolt, an art teacher at Kaimuki Middle, said the tuition reimbursement may have helped to reward teachers who stay in the public schools and encourage others to consider teaching. "Something has to be done in order to invite qualified teachers into the profession," he said. "It's expensive and time consuming to get certified to teach, and teacher's pay is not the greatest."
Teachers would have qualified for the reimbursement if they worked in a hard-to-fill position, such as special education or at a high-poverty school, or if they were teaching in the subject area in which they were qualified.
The reimbursement would be made over the six-year period, with payments ending if a teacher left the district before the end of six years. Half of the tuition reimbursement would have come in the sixth year of teaching.
Ito predicted swift passage of the bill next year, and Husted said HSTA would ask all gubernatorial candidates to agree to sign the bill early in the session.
"It was a good bill," Ito said. "That might be the first bill going out next year."
Staff writer Lynda Arakawa contributed to this report.
Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.
