Education focus of Hickman's legislation

Although he admits “identifying five percent of the budget to reduce” is perhaps the most important issue before the Oklahoma State Legislature this session, District 58 Rep. Jeff Hickman, R-Fairview, noted there are a few other issues that are close to his heart.

Many of those issues relate to education matters such as school schedules, school consolidation and school test coordinators.

In HB 1864, which is the first bill Hickman filed for the 2009 session, he has converted time requirements for school years from days into strictly hours.

“Under current law schools must have their doors open 180 days a year for six hours a day,” the Representative said, noting that his bill would require schools to be in session for a total of 1,080 hours a year.

He explained that this will still require students to be in school for the same amount of total time, but doesn’t force schools to be open 180 days.

“It gives flexibility back to the local school board and the local school district to find what schedule is best for them,” Hickman said.

Since there are certain costs associated with every day that a school building is opened, with electrical costs and heating or cooling, he noted that allowing schools to choose fewer but longer days may even “hopefully achieve some cost savings. “Cost savings seem to be a major driving force behind recent pushes for school consolidation throughout the state, Hickman said, noting that a number of bills were filed by his fellow representatives to establish a law requiring that school districts below a certain student population be required to consolidate.

He said a Representative from Owasso recommended setting the limit at 7,000 students, which he found to be “completely ridiculous.”

In fact, Hickman said he finds the whole notion of basing consolidation on student population ridiculous and thinks that consolidation should be determined by the size of a school district’s geographic area and the distance to the next closest school site.

For example, he said it would make much more sense to consolidate “two 10 square mile districts just five miles apart” than it would be to consolidate a school district like Freedom with Buffalo, Alva, or Mooreland, which are all more than 30 miles away.

So Hickman has filed a House Concurrent Resolution (HCR-1003) to establish a task force to study the school consolidation issue and more closely evaluate which is the better consolidation method: by student population size or by geographical district size and proximity of next school district.

He furthered his argument against consolidation based on smaller student population by noting that if true cost savings is what the legislature wants, consolidating two larger schools such as Norman and Moore or Jenks and Broken Arrow, which pay their superintendents more and have more assistant superintendents, would probably realize more savings than consolidating Freedom where the superintendent also serves as the principal for both the elementary and high school as well as fills in as bus driver or janitor when needed.

Despite appreciating the many hats that school officials sometimes wear in order to keep their school districts running, Hickman said he believes there are some officials who are required to do too much.

Specifically, he said that school counselors are sometimes kept from actually counseling the students because they are serving as the school’s test coordinator, organizing and issuing all of the many state mandated tests, of which there are more than 40 for all age levels.

So in HB 1867, Hickman wrote a bill outlining that “the test coordinator shall not be the school counselor.”

“Hopefully that will get counselors back to what they should be doing and what they want to be doing-helping the children,” he said.

Hickman noted that he filed several other education bills within his 30 bill filing limit, including a bill he has worked with the Governor’s office on that would allow school land commissioners “the same flexibility in their investments that our retirement systems have.”

Besides his various election bills, Hickman noted that he also filed two similar bills that would act as “recruitment tools” and allow for income tax exemptions for those moving to rural Oklahoma counties.

The first bill, HB 1869, is one that he has “filed previously numerous times” and is known as the “Come Home to Oklahoma Act.”

The “Come Home” act would provide a five-year Oklahoma income tax exemption for those moving out of state and buying or building a home in one of several Oklahoma counties that have been losing population.

The second bill is an exemption targeted at encouraging physicians to relocate their practices to rural counties with populations less than 200,000.

However, there are some other slight differences from HB 1869 such as the fact that the physicians don’t have to be moving from out of state. Also the physician’s exemption is only for the first $100,000 of income, Hickman said.

He noted both measures are intended to help bring people to rural Oklahoma where they are desperately needed to ensure that Oklahoma’s smaller communities continue to survive and thrive.

Other bills filed by Hickman this year address the purchase of fire arms, speeding fines, trespassing law, drug testing for unemployment benefits and posting county abbreviations on license stickers for automobile tags.

But because reducing the state budget will be such a big issue this year, Hickman noted that most of what legislators will consider this session will be “a lot of policy changes . . . things that don’t require new money to implement.”