Education

The Department of Education (“Department”) currently administers the High Needs Educator Student Loan Repayment Program, the Speech-Language Pathologist Student Loan Repayment Program, and the Mental Health Services Student Loan Repayment Program. Annually, these programs help roughly 600 public school employees, including educators, speech-language pathologists, school counselors, school psychologists, and school social workers, through a single application process, by making loan payments directly to student loan lenders. But paying the lenders directly has caused 2 persistent issues: 1. Because the payments are considered taxable income, award recipients have the tax withheld from their paychecks, even though the payments go directly to the lenders. This lowers the award recipients’ take-home pay and can create confusion and hardship. 2. The process involves sending out 600 or more individual checks each year. And many checks are returned or delayed due to changes in lender information or system mismatches. To avoid these issues, the Department recommends combining the 3 different student loan repayment programs into a single program and changing the award process from a system that repays lenders directly to a system that pays stipends to public school employees through the State central payroll operation. These changes would streamline a system that already uses a single application and would do all of the following: 1. Avoid surprise tax impacts and imputed income issues. 2. Reduce administrative burden and failed payments. 3. Provide more timely and transparent support to award recipients. The suggested changes are easy to implement, budget-neutral, and could allow public school employees who previously declined awards due to the tax consequences to benefit from the financial support. This Act makes the changes recommended by the Department by doing all of the following: 1. Eliminates the separate Speech-Language Pathologist Student Loan Repayment Program, Mental Health Services Student Loan Repayment Program, and High Needs Educator Student Loan Repayment Program, and combines them into a single program under § 4163 of Title 14. 2. Shifts payment of awards from paying the lenders directly to paying the award recipients a stipend through the State central payroll operation. 3. Streamlines the process for determining financial need by allowing the Department to focus on collecting the income and loan information that is necessary to fairly allocate program funds. 4. Changes the title of § 4163 of Title 14 from the High Needs Educator Student Loan Repayment Program to the “Public School Employee Support Program for High Need Areas” because the 3 programs are now combined into a single program and the program is no longer a direct student loan repayment program. This Act also makes technical corrections to conform existing law to the standards of the Delaware Legislative Drafting Manual.

This Act aligns state special education law with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and its implementing regulations, and also clarifies that a parent’s representative may obtain copies of a student’s special education records.

This Act amends the Fiscal Year 2025 Bond and Capital Improvements Act to (1) authorize local bond shares to adjust for William Penn High School in the Colonial School District. Further, this Act amends Fiscal Year 2025 Bond and Capital Improvements Act to (2) authorize the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, with concurrence of the Controller General and the Co-Chairs of the Joint Committee on Capital, to transfer any necessary spending authority from the Cultural Access Fund; (3) revise allocations to the City of Dover and Downtown Dover Partnership; (4) revise the allocation for the University of Delaware for Deferred Maintenance from Laboratories to Campus Improvements; (5) revise the State and Local share allocations for the Smyrna Roof Replacement project and authorizes School Construction Market Pressure to be transferrable between Fiscal Years 2023 and 2024 to achieve allocations; (6) adjust School Safety and Security funding from the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, Delaware State Police, Special Investigation to reflect State Bureau of Identification; (7) removes the requirement of school districts and charter schools to obligate prior fiscal year MCI funds prior to utilizing Enhanced MCI; (8) authorize the transfer of any remaining funds from Legislative Hall major and minor capital improvement appropriations to be used for the Legislative Hall Garage/Expansion project; (9) authorize the transfer of any remaining funds from the Domestic Violence Coordinating Feasibility Study to the Criminal Justice Council for Family Justice Center startup costs; (10) authorizes the transfer of funds allocated for the Scannell Readiness Center and up to $500,000 of available Minor Capital Improvements to cover the project for the Bethany Beach Training Barracks; (11) authorizes funds from Capital School District’s Certificate of Necessity (CN 2113A) to be used to support new facilities for the Kent County Community School and Kent County Secondary ILC; (12) authorize the Department of Transportation to use Community Transportation Funds for one-time reimbursements for various projects; (13) reprograms funding from the Community Redevelopment/Reinvestment Fund from Downtown Milford, Inc. to the Delaware State Fair, the Milford District Fee Public Library Commission, and Kent Sussex Industries; (14) authorize the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to perform an adaptive reuse study for the Delaware State Police Troop 7; and (15) remove the deadline date requiring Sussex County Council to adopt § 6961, Title 9 of the Delaware Code.