SB 978 - This act revises the Missouri Career Development and Teacher Excellence Plan also known as Career Ladder which provides career pay as a salary supplement for public school teachers.

Participating teachers shall be required to meet career step qualification criteria and failure to complete professional requirements for each stage may be grounds for denial of career pay authorized under the district plan.

The state shall provide matching funds for career pay to school districts based upon a new schedule. The state portion is based upon a district's adjusted equalized assessed valuation per eligible pupil for the second preceding school year (district's AV). In distributing these matching funds, school districts shall be ranked by the district's AV from the highest to the lowest and placed into groups. Group one shall contain the lowest twelve and one-half percent of districts based on AV, and group two shall contain the next lowest twelve and one-half percent of districts. The remaining seventy-five percent of school districts shall be rank ordered from largest to smallest based on enrollment and placed in groups three and four. Group three shall contain the highest twenty-five percent of these school districts based on enrollment, and group four shall contain the remaining fifty percent of all public school districts. State and local funding shall be provided for the groups as follows:

GROUP % of Districts % State Funding % Local Funding 1 12.5% 30% 70% 2 12.5% 40% 60% 3 25% 50% 50% 4 50% 60% 40%

Beginning in the 1996-97 school year, any school district which participated in the Career Ladder program in 1995-96 and paid less than the local funding percentage required under this act shall increase its local share of Career Ladder costs by at least five percentage points from the preceding year until the district pays the percentage share of cost required by the act. Any district not participating in the 1995-96 school year or any district which interrupts its Career Ladder program for any subsequent year must enter the program on the cost sharing basis required by the act.

The act provides that career pay shall also be provided to school psychological examiners, parents as teachers educators, school psychologists, special education diagnosticians and speech pathologists in the state schools for the severely handicapped, the Missouri School for the Blind and the Missouri School for the Deaf.
OTTO FAJEN