House addresses school funding, property taxes

The past week was slow in the House. We had hustled the weeks before to pass all of our bills over to the Senate before the second funnel deadline.

We are beginning to deal with the Senate bills that we’ve received as well as the “bouncers,” House bills that have been passed by the Senate with amendments. Soon we will transition into the budget portion of the session.

We have reached agreement with the Senate and the Governor’s office on school funding and have passed it as Senate File 167. While our original House proposal included more money for schools, this final agreement includes a couple of key wins secured by Iowa House Republicans that would not have happened if we hadn’t held out for more money over the Senate’s original bill.

This final agreement includes a 2% increase in SSA for Fiscal Year 2026 plus an additional $5 per student in one time money. This results in more than $105 million more in school aid for public schools.

This same 2% increase goes for families that wish to utilize the Education Savings Account for private schools.

This year also brings phase two of the teacher salary increase. This will include almost $35 million additional dollars for public schools.

This bill also includes and increase to the Operational Sharing program widely utilized by our rural schools. It increases the Operational Sharing cap from 21 to 25, an additional $942,087 for public schools.

Also, the bill includes an additional 3% increase in transportation equity, another boost for our rural schools. This equates to $1,554,938 more transportation equity funding for our rural public schools.

Altogether, these increases equate to a 2.8% increase in state funding to public schools.

House Republicans secured more than $4.7 million in additional investments for public schools through our negotiations with the Senate. These increases represent many of the specific funding issues we hear from our school districts.

While each line item may not affect each individual school district equally, one line item may have a big impact on addressing the issue a specific district is facing. House Republicans are working to respond to the specific concerns we’re hearing from our schools in a responsible manner.

Work continues on property tax legislation. The message I’m getting from constituents is loud and clear — property taxes are rising too far and too fast.

Conversely, the message I’m getting from local government officials is quite different. They overwhelmingly complain that they don’t have enough revenue to meet the needs, citing rising costs as a prime reason.

These two views, at complete odds with each other, will make for an interesting — and difficult — discussion on precisely how to deal with the property tax issue. I highly recommend that any citizen that is concerned with property tax increases contact your school, county and city officials and talk to them about why property taxes are rising so fast.

As always, I look forward to seeing you at the Capitol, or in the district.