On Tuesday, October 11th, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will hear public recommendations regarding the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) for next year (2023-2024). As we do each year, LFT will advocate for the largest raise possible for teachers and school employees.

Despite pay increases in recent years, Louisiana teachers and school employees remain below the Southern Regional Average and National Average for pay. In fact, recent state-wide pay raises have been canceled out by increases to insurance premiums from the Office of Group Benefits (OGB). This has

After receiving emails from hundreds of LFT members, LDOE announced that they would give teachers until December 16^th to get all their information into the glitchy eSER system. Teachers are still required to get in all their IEPs by October 1^st, the only difference is that now you're allowed to submit them on paper, as long as you re-enter the information into the electronic system by December 16^th.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help teachers who have already sunk hours into navigating a broken system and are still under enormous pressure to submit everything by the end of the week. LDOE’s

Louisiana's new electronic Special Education Reporting System (eSER) isn't working. It's the new platform that the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) implemented to track Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) for special education students. The rollout of this new electronic database has been riddled with bugs and defects that make it difficult, if not impossible for the special education teachers forced to use it.

The annual fall deadline to submit new and expiring IEPs is October 1st, but many special education teachers have not been able to input the data, despite spending hours

This legislative session we saw an onslaught of damaging bills, aimed at weakening public education and undermining teachers’ voices. Many of our elected legislators who praised teachers as heroes at the beginning of the pandemic are now working to defund schools and micromanage teachers’ lesson plans. Thankfully, many of these bills failed to pass, but make no mistake, these attacks will continue.

Funding

This year the legislature approved a $1,500 raise for teachers/certified personnel and $750 for support staff. This is the third pay raise in four years, totaling $3,300 for teachers and $1