By inserting the stipend Louisiana public school employees have enjoyed for the past two years into the budget for next year, legislators may end up writing checks with their mouths that later they can’t cash.
Somewhat surpassingly, the fiscal year 2026 budget contains, for a third year in a row, a $2,000 stipend for educators and $1,000 for staff. Extending it one more year wasn’t supposed to happen in the wake of the defeat of a constitutional amendment that used educational trust funds to pay down unfunded accrued liabilities in pension plans, which then would have the leftover funds no longer encumbered at the local level passed along into permanent raises.
But House Republicans pulled a rabbit from their hat when the Appropriations Committee, with full support of its Democrats, included the raises again. It took near-magic to do so: blocking $91 million dollars in funding for new vehicle and heavy equipment purchases for state agencies, cutting $26 million dollars in benefits for ineligible Medicaid recipients, plowing in $20 million dollars because of a hiring freeze, by paying down debt early to save $25 million dollars in interest, and halting a $30 million intensive tutoring program in the Department of Education.
This calculus is sketchy. The $25 million will be banked, but $20 million and $26 million figures are contingent and especially the latter may not be close (although it could go higher, as the Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration prided itself on stuffing as many people as possible onto Medicaid as proof that it “cared” and to gain greater control over people’s lives). Plus, the $30 million may be better spent as is.
And while the $92 million is certain, it is one-time money. That might not be so bad if cobbling together these revenues served as a sure and short bridge to a permanent funding source, which is intended through two pieces of legislation essentially trying again to induce the swap of idle funds to pay off the UAL as required by the Constitution. HB 473 would amend the Constitution to free the money while HB 466 would direct it to raises promulgated by each local education agency, upon passage voters of the HB 473 language.
However, the problem is the popular vote won’t come until the Nov. 3, 2026 federal election date, and even if that succeeds it wouldn’t be until Jan. 1, 2027 that it comes into effect. That’s no big deal if, as part of a strategy to pass the amendment, the stipends disappear during the first half of FY 2027, putting pressure on supporters of the raise to vote for the amendment. Likely the vote wasn’t bumped up to this fall’s election date because evidence suggests the loss this spring of the larger measure including this mechanism in part was due to lower turnout so backers wanted to maximize its chances of passage, even as that adds another year to the intended solution.
If GOP legislators want to use a half-year without stipend as a motivational tool, then they have to resist calls of being tagged as unfair and/or uncaring by not coughing up the roughly $100 million to account for the first half of FY 2027. And where would they get that, by delaying the same purchases again? Worse, what if the amendment failed again with a then-3.5 year history of the stipend, increasing the pressure even more to fund what technically is temporary but which increasingly becomes considered permanent? The political pressure to increase will continue to magnify.
What happened in Bossier Parish provides a microcosm. When the amendment failed, the school board – which six years earlier insisted a raise could happen only by voting in hefty new property taxes that would have given the district the highest rates in the state, but which voters handily turned down – suddenly found money enough to give an equivalent raise even though the district’s financial position was hardly any better now than then. It did so because it had banked on the state coming up with the money but when it didn’t the political pressure became too much to resist.
The best approach would be to forgo the raise in the budget and change the date of the amendment to this year. That would create a lot of lobbyists out of school employees to cajole voters into supporting the amendment, even in a low-turnout affair. Crying wolf that there’s no money for stipends then finding it year after year just habituates voters into thinking it always will be that way and will reduce their ardor to act to create a permanent solution that doesn’t involve tax increases.
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