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Senate Education

Wednesday, March 18, 2026·56m·▶ Watch / Listen

The Senate Education Committee unanimously advanced a minor auditing cleanup bill to the consent calendar and heard extensive testimony on a sweeping at-risk student funding transparency bill, laying the latter over to April 1st after sponsors disclosed that several amendments — including one still being drafted — were not yet ready for action.

Key Actions

·HB 26-1191 – Examination of School District RecordsPassed

+ 1 more action

Controversies

SB 26-103 applicability to charter schools — redundancy and local control

Sarah Hunt, president of the Charter Advocacy Coalition, argued that charter schools are already accountable for serving at-risk students through existing authorizer contracts and that the bill risks undermining charter school innovation through prescriptive policy requirements and imposes administrative burden with minimal student benefit. Bill sponsors Senators Marchman and Kolker did not directly rebut Hunt's arguments on the record during her testimony, though Marchman described Amendment L003 as adding flexibility for districts.

+ 2 more controversies

Notable Quotes

“These deserts don't wait for an accountability score. They exist now and under current law we only deploy the tools to fight them after a school has already been rated as failing.”

Senator Janice Marchman — Senator Marchman was explaining the core policy problem SB 26-103 addresses — that under current law, community school intervention tools are only available to schools already in crisis on the accountability clock.

+ 4 more quotes

Votes

Move HB 26-1191 to the committee of the wholePassed
Yes (5)Scott Bright, Lisa Frizell, Janice Rich, Janice Marchman, Chris Kolker
Absent (2)Cathy Kipp, Marc Snyder
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TranscriptPreview
Chris Phelan, please take the roll. Senators Bright. Here. Frizzell. Here. Kip. Excused. Rich. Here. Snyder. Excused. Marchman. Here. Mr. Chair. Here. We have a quorum, and I know we're waiting for one. Bill sponsor, who is chairing judicial, said he would come up, but I think we could start right, Senator? Okay, Senator Frazelle, you go ahead, and you can just start us off on HB 1191. Go ahead, Senator Frazelle. Thank you, Mr. Chair and Committee members, I'm here today to present House Bill 26:1191 to you for your consideration. As the chair of the Legislative Audit Committee, it is my great pleasure to bring this bill on behalf of the Legislative Audit Committee. This is simply a language cleanup. Really should have been done way back in 2021, but it wasn't. And so here we are five years later. All this does is it makes the examination, the review of state education fund expenditures on capital construction projects, discretionary rather than mandatory. I don't know. It's pretty simple. That's. That's what I have. That's what you have. That's it. Any questions for the bill sponsor? See? None. Do we have any testimony? No. No testimony. Do you…
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