Your Chamber of Commerce represents you in Austin and Washington on legislative issues. To do a good job, the Chamber staff needs to know what you, the members, think about key issues. The answers to these questions will help in the creation of the Chamber's legislative agenda for 2019.

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* 1. Texas should continue to provide grants to attract high profile researchers to Texas Universities.

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* 2. Texas State Colleges and Universities should streamline transfers with common course numbering systems and elimination of dupiclate paperwork.

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* 3. Texas should modify the higher education funding systems to incentivize desired outcomes like workforce readiness, certificate attainment and degree completion.

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* 4. Texas should include desired student outcomes like certificate completion, diploma awarded, acceptance in the military, the workforce or higher education, in the funding formulas for K-12 education.

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* 5. Texas should fund the Texas Grants and Texas Equilization Grants programs. (Tuition grants to well prepared students with demonstrated financial needs.)

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* 6. Texas should incentivize dual credit courses which prepare students for jobs after High School graduation and reduce the overall cost of degree completion.

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* 7. Texas should leave restroom use by gender to local policy makers.  Additional bathroom regulations are unnecessary.

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* 8. Texas should fund full day, universal PreK encouraging innovative delivery systems that meet high standards.

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* 9. The Legislature should not enact any unfunded mandates on education providers and work to fund those already in place.

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* 10. Texas should invest 45% of the cost of K-12 education from the state, reducing the local property tax burden to 45% with 10% coming from Federal funds.  (Currently the state funds about 37%, the federal government 10% and local property tax payers 53%.)

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* 11. Texas should keep all taxes collected as "School Taxes" in the education funding system.  ($3.5 billion were diverted from school taxes to the general fund in the current biennium.)

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* 12. Texas should support vouchers or education savings accounts to allow students to pursue private education options.

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* 13. If the Legislature approves vouchers and education savings accounts, they should be reserved for students in chronically failing public schools.

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* 14. Texas should continually improve the school district and campus accountability system until it accurately reflects student performance and progress.

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* 15. Texas should devise a plan to reduce the number of school districts in Texas.  Today there are 1224 districts.  Forty-nine of them educate about 50% of Texas students.

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* 16. Texas should change sentencing guidelines to reduce the inmate population and flex those savings to fund education.

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* 17. Texas should reduce funds spent on Mexican border security and flex those funds to education funding.

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* 18. Texas must develop, implement and fund a plan that will reduce the probablity of deadly assaults in Texas Schools.

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* 19. The solution to deadly assaults in schools is to arm teachers and administrators.

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