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Three local school boards met Friday morning to get updates on education-related legislation from a pair of local general assembly members.

The McMinn County, Athens City and Etowah City school boards met at Michael’s in Athens Friday to hear from State Rep. Mark Cochran (R-Englewood) and State Sen. Adam Lowe (R-Calhoun) about legislative issues.

One of the topics each elected official spoke about was the new school funding system in the state, TISA (Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement). TISA is a law that initiated this year and has replaced the Basic Education Program (BEP) and moved from resource-based funding to student-based funding.

Cochran noted that through TISA, the Tennessee General Assembly has increased annual appropriations for education by more than $1 billion, including $125 million going toward teacher salaries in the hope of paying teachers a minimum $50,000 by the 2026-2027 school year.

At that point, Cochran said Tennessee would be in the top 10 nationwide in teacher pay.

“We’re happy to take these steps and make that investment into education,” he said.

Cochran noted that McMinn County Schools will see a funding boost of $8 million and Athens City Schools will be just behind that.

Lowe added that the Government Operations Committee he is a member of provided oversight in the writing of the TISA rules.

“There’s many times in the government operations committee that these departments come to us with rules and we send these rules back because this is not true to the intent of the legislation,” he said.

That was the case with TISA, as Gov. Bill Lee promised that no school system would lose funding under TISA.

“The new rules come out and, guess what — some schools lose funding,” Lowe said. “It was government operations that said ‘come back with rules that say no loss in funding.’”

He said the department of education employees used subsidies to ensure all systems would increase funding for the first five years.

“As student population changes, your funding will change,” Lowe explained.

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