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After Speaker Kotek broke her promise I am not sure how or why Republicans would trust anyone across the aisle.

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Rob, thanks for this overview. It is good to see you adding your voice here.

It's also good to see an agenda that includes "additional funds to ensure that K-12 students and teachers can catch up after a year of online learning" and additional investments in workforce development. However, I'd like to see more connection between the two.

Investments in our health care and manufacturing workforce are sorely needed, but that's also the case for training and supporting more teachers and educational professionals. There are real shortages in the staffing of our schools which will only get worse if more teachers and others continue to leave for other jobs. It's one thing to have a budget that adds positions, it's another to be able to fill those positions and support those who fill them. Responses to date, like allowing unlicensed adults to help out in the classroom on a temporary basis, have been helpful. But those are stopgap solutions. I expect you know all this better than I. My point here is that it would be wise not to silo the workforce investment agenda from the education improvement agenda -- or at least not to view the challenge of getting our school kids back on track from the challenge of investing in the pipeline for new educators, supports for current educators and new ways to expand community participation in our schools.

More generally, rather than arguing over whether, after more than a year of interrupted learning, our kids are alright (hey, our grad rate only declined by two points) or not (yeah, but freshmen course completions fell by almost ten points), I think that our kids would be better served by acknowledging that we created a crisis for them, because of our necessary but still disruptive responses to the pandemic -- an experience unlike any our generations experienced in our school years -- and that this will necessitate (a) acknowledging the crisis, (b) coming up with new learning recovery and emotional support plans for our kids (c) recognizing what this has meant for our teachers, and (d) coming up with better ways to recruit, train, support and reward teachers and others in their roles in our schools.

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