Almost 200 bills were reported out of committee in the Legislature this week…just sit with that a minute…ok, ready to move on, because we have miles to go before we sleep since that long list of bills includes…deep breath…SB 285 (mandatory kindergarten), SB 463 (FAFSA completion as a graduation requirement with various waivers), and HB 6255 (legislation to address lingering debt from the Detroit Public Schools takeover of a decade ago) which got voted out of the House Education Committee on Tuesday; HB 5450-51 (requiring schools to notify families about Michigan’s new safe storage laws) and SB 1142 (simplifying PD requirements for counselors) which were reported out of Senate Education Committee on Tuesday; and HB 6060-61 (bills that did one thing coming out of committee and were later amended on the House floor to completely change their purpose) which got rammed out of House Labor Committee late Thursday night. The Senate was in session three days this week including a marathon Thursday session that ran until 5:30am on Friday morning and managed to pass SB 943-44 and 946-47 (bills that would impose various new requirements on the education management organizations that charter schools contract with for their instructional and other services), SB 995 (expanding the state’s student teacher stipend to include pre-K teachers who work in publicly funded programs), SB 644 (creating an optional firearm safety curriculum that districts could choose to offer to students as an elective), and SB 1191 (a bill that would revoke governmental immunity for schools and school employees in some CSC cases). The House was in session four days this week (including a rare Friday session day) and their headline action was the passage of HB 6058 (legislation that would raise the cap on how much public employers can contribute to employee health coverage and mandate that all public employers pay at least 80% of health coverage costs), but while that lone bill grabbed most of the attention, they also managed to report out HB 4095-96, 5549, and 5659-60 (the school safety bill package that passed out of committee last week), HB 5741 (requiring MDE to embed first aid basics – including tourniquet use – into the state health education standards), HB 5174 (encouraging but not requiring schools to offer organ donation education), HB 6255 (see above about DPS debt), HB 5735 (removes course names from the MMC law making every subject area requirement similar to how the ELA requirement works now), HB 5594 (a bill to shift the responsibility for issuing work permits away from schools and over to the State Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity), HB 6060-61 (the versions that passed were pension clean-up bills that remove things like automatic plan closure, retirement age changes, and employee debt sharing requirements for employees in the Pension Plus 2 system), and HB 6002-5, 6022 (require tobacco retailers to be licensed and impose penalties for underage sales including potential loss of tobacco sales licenses). With only one more week of legislative session currently scheduled before the end of the year, Michigan’s constitutional “five day rule” means that all of the bills listed above as having passed the House or Senate are still alive and any bills that didn’t pass at least one chamber by adjournment on Friday are likely dead for the year (some exclusions may apply, not valid for every bill, see your local lobbyist for details)…which mostly just means that SB 1142 (see above about counselor PD) is very likely done for the year and will have to be reintroduced next session. In contrast, HB 5649 (requires high schools to offer an in-person computer science course unless they determine that is not “feasible,” in which case they can offer an online CS course instead), made it all the way to Governor Whitmer’s desk this week and is expected to be signed into law.