www.thecentersquare.com – By Bethany Blankley | The Center Square contributor – (The Center Square – ) 2025-05-06 17:59:00
(The Center Square) – State Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who authored the Texas Senate’s education package, including Texas’ first school choice bill, is countering a claim made by Texas AFT that public schools remain underfunded.
Texas AFT called on the Texas Senate, including Creighton, to pass a House public school funding bill claiming, “educators and staff across the state have been laid off, campuses have been closed and consolidated, and deep budget cuts threatened extracurriculars, academic programs, and the support staff who helped the whole student thrive.”
“State leadership has spent the last two sessions picking winners and losers in education policy, and somehow neighborhood schools never come out on top. I can’t stress this enough: Texas public schools are facing an existential crisis, and we need lawmakers to move with a real sense of urgency,” Texas AFT president Zeph Capo said.
Texas AFT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO and represents all non-administrative certified and classified public school employees in Texas.
Creighton replied, saying, “after saying they’d be OK forgoing teacher raises in order to kill school choice last session, the Texas AFT is at it again,” offering to correct Capo’s claims with “some actual facts.”
Creighton’s SB 26 includes the “largest investment in teacher pay raises in Texas history – and likely the nation,” he said. He filed the bill earlier this year, which unanimously passed the Senate in February, The Center Squarereported.
It allocates nearly $5 billion to implement pay raises for public school teachers and includes incentives for additional pay, liability protection, and other provisions. The $5 billion is “a permanent allotment in the state budget dedicated to teacher salaries,” he said.
An education package filed by state Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, which includes teacher pay raises, doesn’t include a permanent allotment like the Senate version, Creighton said. “For this reason, we are in negotiations to protect it,” he said. “With these raises and other incentives, teachers will have opportunities to earn more than $100,000 a year.”
Buckley’s HB 2, which would allocate nearly $8 billion for additional classroom funding and teacher pay increases, passed the House in April by a vote of 142-5.
The House’s Teacher Bill of Rights also passed in April, which includes enhanced penalties for public school students who commit violence or make threats of violence, The Center Square reported.
The Texas Teacher Bill of Rights is “a national model for ensuring our educators get the compensation and respect they deserve,” Creighton said.
Among other measures, SB 26 allows public school teachers to enroll their children in their school’s pre-K program, if offered, for free; includes liability protections for educators so they “no longer need to pay an organization for liability insurance;” provides a “teacher preparation program that supports uncertified educators already in the classroom on their path to certification;” expands access and options for those seeking to become teachers, Creighton said. It also expands mechanisms to strengthen the state’s education “workforce, recognizing talent, and ensuring every student has a qualified teacher,” he said.
Ahead of the Texas House passing Creighton’s school choice bill, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law on Saturday, Abbott said the legislature was “providing more funding than ever before” for public schools “and a higher teacher pay raise than ever before in the history of our state.”
The roughly $330 billion two-year budgets proposed by the Texas House and Senate allocate roughly $96 billion for public school funding for Texas’ 5.5 million public school K-12 students. The majority, $80 billion, comes from state and local funds, the remainder comes from the federal government.
Average funding per public school student is more than $15,000, nearly double the basic allotment of $6,160, the governor’s office says.
Some claim, pointing to Texas Education Agency data, that when adjusting for inflation, per-student funding is closer to funding levels from roughly a decade ago.
According to a Texas Association of School Business Officials survey, 65% of 190 school districts listed deficit budget/lack of resources as their top problem followed by low or declining enrollment. Roughly 42% of districts surveyed said they are reporting ending fiscal 2024 in a deficit and didn’t anticipate giving raises without help from the legislature. Nearly 63% said they expect to end fiscal 2025 in a deficit; 55.3% said they will need to make budget cuts for fiscal 2026, according to the survey.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said that school districts are cutting their budgets because they kept spending based on temporary federal COVID-era relief money.
“Many school districts went out and hired people with that money,” Patrick said. “So a lot of the cutbacks that they’re talking about is because they spent the money on ongoing things. Our funding for education is higher than it’s ever been.”
He also points out that from 2019 to 2025, public school enrollment only increased by 100,000 students statewide while state funding “has dwarfed that. We’re spending much, much more money for roughly the same number of students” who were enrolled in public schools five years ago.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Right
The article predominantly presents the perspectives of Texas state leadership, particularly focusing on the claims of Sen. Brandon Creighton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who defend the state’s education policies and funding. The language used is in favor of the state’s approach, emphasizing increased funding, teacher pay raises, and the introduction of school choice bills. The article contrasts the views of Texas AFT, a teacher’s union, but does not delve deeply into its criticisms. The tone reflects a pro-government and pro-reform stance, especially with the emphasis on the state’s increased funding and changes to education policies, suggesting a Center-Right bias toward the reforms and political figures mentioned.
Texas power plants and chemical companies benefit from President Donald Trump’s easing of Biden-era pollution regulations, experts say. The W.A. Parish Generating Station near Houston, a major mercury polluter, is among six Texas coal plants granted a two-year exemption from stricter Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). Additionally, chemical companies received a two-year delay on the 2024 Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards (HON Rule). Critics argue these rollbacks prioritize industry profits over public health and may lead to permanent repeal of regulations. Environmentalists warn of increased toxic emissions affecting nearby communities, urging public action against the regulatory rollbacks.
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The nonprofit publication Capital & Main produced this article. It is co-published with permission.
For Donna Thomas, smokestacks are a typical sight from her home in Fort Bend County. Since she was a child, she has seen the coal and natural gas-powered W.A. Parish Generating Station puff clouds of haze during the day and light up brightly at night. The facility — which has been around since 1958 — is both part of the background and all she thinks about.
Thomas is not alone. For decades, residents have expressed concerns over the pollution emitted from the Parish coal plant — a separate facility from the natural gas plant — and called for its closure. The plant, located about 30 miles southwest of downtown Houston, is ranked by Texas environmental regulators as one of the worst polluters in the state for certain hazardous emissions. These include mercury, a toxic heavy metal particularly harmful for children and pregnant people.
This year, mercury has been top of mind for environmental activists and residents like Thomas. In April, President Donald Trump announced an exemption for companies from implementing stricter Biden-era mercury regulations for two years. Of the 163 eligible coal plants, 11 are in Texas and six have been approved, including Parish’s operator, NRG Energy. In Missouri and Illinois, five coal plants have been exempted, and in Pennsylvania, all 12 of the coal plants seeking approval have been approved.
Then in July, Trump exempted chemical companies for two years from Biden’s 2024 HON Rule, a set of regulations that control hazardous air emissions from chemical plants called the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.
The Trump administration determined the exemptions are in the country’s best interest and represent a burden on industry, and that the technology is not available to meet stricter regulations. Companies like NRG agree.
However, critics say the Biden administration’s 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — called MATS for short — and the HON Rule were long overdue and the two-year delay in implementing them is merely a tactic to protect industry profit margins at the expense of public health.
Moreover, critics point out that the MATS delay may be giving companies the freedom to ignore toxic air emission rules until the Trump administration repeals the Biden-era regulations altogether. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump proposed a rule to eliminate the 2024 MATS rule completely.
The two rules together have set off alarm bells for experts and environmentalists in Texas, home to one of the world’s largest petrochemical sectors and 11 coal-powered plants. The exemptions will run from 2027 — when the Biden rules were supposed to take effect — to 2029.
“We know these rollbacks are not good for anyone, especially for those that are community fenceline,” said Thomas, also the founder and president of the Fort Bend Environmental — a grassroots organization focused on environmental justice. “We have around 1,000 homes within three miles of Parish, so that’s going to affect all of them.”
A two-year delay
The EPA has been working on stricter environmental regulations for chemical plants since the early 1990s. Only in 2020 did Biden’s EPA begin drafting new rules in earnest.
But owners of the chemical plants should not act so surprised, said Neil Carman, a former regulator for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
“The chemical industry has known for decades that this was all coming, but they don’t like rules, because it means they have to put on more pollution control and they have to do more leak inspections,” said Carman, now the clean air director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club. “These plants will always tell you safety first, safety first, but then you run into this thing called money.”
Of the 79 chemical facilities in Texas requesting exemptions, 15 have been approved, including 13 along the Gulf Coast and the so-called petrochemical corridor.
Carman pointed out that the heads of chemical companies have been in talks with Trump’s EPA since the election. In March, the administration announced that companies could apply for exemption from MATS, HON and seven other sets of emissions standards.
That same month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin met with Dow Inc. Chair-CEO Jim Fitterling to discuss regulations imposed by the Biden administration, according to public records and emails obtained by the Sierra Club.
In one email sent on March 17, Dow reps asked to discuss “clarity” on the EPA’s recent announcement that it will reconsider the HON rule and “Dow has met with the Office of Air and Radiation regarding an extension of the current compliance deadline, which is impossible to meet.”
In May, Zeldin met with Fitterling and other chemical company CEOs to discuss the industry at large. Then in July, Trump announced the exemptions for HON, including for two chemical plants in Louisiana and one in Seadrift, Texas, operated by Dow and its subsidiary Union Carbide.
In a statement to Capital & Main, a Dow spokesperson said that “safety and integrity are at the core of both companies’ operations” and the “extensions are appropriate and necessary to address the technical challenges and to ensure the continued safe and efficient operation of these facilities.”
Carman doesn’t buy it. He worked as an environmental regulator in Texas for 12 years. Even then, he said, companies never seemed to be able to find the budget to limit their emissions and chemical leaks. For him, it’s still the cost.
“A lot of these are old plants and so when they go in and do all this work,” Carman said, “they have to find a place where they’re going to put in new controls and they have to engineer it. They have to design it all. It’s months of planning, but these rules were out there. They knew they were coming. They just want two more years of delay.”
Limiting mercury
When the EPA implemented the 2012 MATS rule, mercury emissions dropped 86% — or four tons — in five years.
In 2024, Biden’s EPA approved a rule to strengthen MATS by tightening the emissions standards for mercury by another 70% and reducing pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired plants by more than 660 million pounds per year.
The rule could prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths, 2,800 cases of chronic bronchitis and 130,000 asthma attacks, according to the EPA under Biden.
However, in April, Trump approved the exemptions for 47 coal-powered plants across the nation. As of mid-August, 70 are now exempted, including Parish.
“These rules were just so critically important to people’s health,” said Surbhi Sarang, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. The Trump administration “was doing this process that was just not transparent. I mean, there was no process. Whereas in rulemaking, there’s public comment. This is just like a presidential action that was kind of taken in a vacuum and then announced.”
In response to the exemption, Erik Linden, senior director of communications at NRG, said the time is needed and will be used to evaluate the technology for air quality systems and monitoring equipment for compliance.
“All existing MATS emission controls will be properly maintained and remain in service,” Linden said of the current MATS rules that began in 2012. The exemption would give NRG until 2029 to implement the changes.
However, in July, Trump’s EPA proposed eliminating Biden’s rule entirely by the end of the year. Interested parties had three weeks to submit comments, and the Environmental Defense Fund’s request for an extension was denied.
“Rule-making usually takes 12-18 months if not longer,” Sarang said. “They’re moving very quickly.”
All of this is alarming for residents living near industry. With the extent of the changes to environmental regulations coming down from the Trump administration, there’s a lot for Thomas, the Parish generating station neighbor, to process. But she hasn’t given up. Increasingly, Thomas is talking to her neighbors and fellow residents about fighting back.
This means sending letters to representatives in Texas and in Washington, D.C. Thomas said it pays to be loud.
Parish is “going to do the same thing it’s been doing,” Thomas said. “If the EPA does not put a stop to these [emissions] getting out, then everyone is going to pay for this with their lives and in their water and in their air.”
Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund and NRG Energy have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Copyright 2025 Capital & Main
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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
The content focuses on environmental regulations and critiques the Trump administration’s rollbacks of Biden-era pollution controls, emphasizing the potential public health risks and environmental justice concerns. It highlights the perspectives of environmental activists and regulatory experts who advocate for stricter pollution standards, while portraying industry and the Trump administration’s actions as prioritizing economic interests over health and safety. This framing aligns with a center-left viewpoint that supports stronger environmental protections and regulatory oversight.
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