The Georgia Partnership Recaps the 2025 Session of the Georgia General Assembly
Every year, the Georgia General Assembly meets for 40 days. Sine Die marks the last day that legislators can pass bills and resolutions in the session.
During session, the Georgia Partnership engages with legislators, sharing data and research that informs policy development. We use the EdQuest Georgia priorities as a platform for educating legislators about strategies that expand educational and economic opportunity for more Georgians. As the Georgia Partnership and EdQuest Coalition members mobilize around this goal, we have created a new (forthcoming) online space to share policy resources. Called Partnership on Policy, the space will include content in the form of quick-hitting blog posts, condensed policy summaries, long-form reports, and podcasts.
This legislative recap is the first of many resources that we will post to the Partnership on Policy page.
During a joint meeting of the House Education and Senate Education and Youth Committees in January 2025, Committee Chairmen Representative Chris Erwin and Senator Billy Hickman reiterated their top two priorities: early literacy and school safety. In this legislative recap, the Georgia Partnership spotlights how the General Assembly acted on these priorities and identifies several areas that policymakers should focus on in 2026.
Early Literacy
During the 2023 legislative session, the General Assembly enacted the Georgia Early Literacy Act. The law created a statewide framework redefining how elementary educators deliver reading instruction and how schools support struggling readers. Also in 2023, the legislature created the Georgia Council on Literacy. Each year, the council issues a report that describes the progress made in implementing the Georgia Early Literacy Act’s requirements.
The passage of House Bill 307, approved by the legislature on March 31, 2025, improves upon the original Act by clarifying how districts support students identified with dyslexia. In Issue 2 of the Top Ten Issues to Watch in 2024, the Georgia Partnership identified a statewide implementation challenge – how to ensure coaching and professional learning delivered to elementary educators are effective. House Bill 307 addresses this challenge by creating a new position, the Georgia Literacy Coaching Coordinator, who will be charged with ensuring that the coaching and professional learning across the state is executed with consistency and effectiveness.
On April 2, 2025, the General Assembly also approved Senate Bill 93. The bill revised the Georgia Early Literacy Act to address teacher preparation. It requires the Georgia Professional Standards Commission to establish curriculum requirements for state-approved educator preparation programs. Senate Bill 93 provides a mechanism for state leaders to evaluate whether programs expose teacher candidates to strategies aligned with the science of reading.
While the two bills bolster early literacy efforts, significant work remains. The newly passed state budget provided funding for 116 regional literacy coaches. As part of the CARES Impact Study, the Georgia Partnership highlighted how three districts – Fulton County, Grady County, and Marietta City Schools -implemented structured literacy in their elementary schools. All three districts found that literacy coaches in each elementary school were essential to the successful implementation. As districts added new curriculum resources, coaches provided essential implementation assistance. They trained teachers on the resources and helped them integrate the resources into their classrooms. This often meant taking district-level implementation guidance and developing specific implementation steps that would foster consistency within and across grade levels in their schools. Coaches were also in classrooms, modeling instruction with the new resources, co-teaching with them, and observing and providing feedback.
A survey conducted by the Deal Center in Spring 2024 found that over 40% of small and medium-sized districts have no dedicated district-level reading coaches, compared to 18% of large districts. With over 1800 elementary schools across Ga, more investments in this approach will be needed. Further, even if funding were made available to ensure each elementary school had a dedicated reading coach, there is still an issue with potential staffing. Simply promoting the most effective teachers as reading coaches is not a viable option in most school systems that struggle to recruit and retain educators in the first place.
Recommendations for 2026
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School Safety
After the Apalachee High School shooting in September 2024, House leaders worked with state agencies to develop a comprehensive bill to mitigate school safety challenges. House Bill 268 addresses the lack of data sharing and the timely transfer of records. Specifically, the bill requires Regional Education Service Agencies (RESAs) to improve data sharing between school systems and child-serving agencies and accelerates the timeline for transfer of student records from ten to five school days. House Bill 268 also provides grants for districts to employ student advocacy specialists and requires school systems to identify how they will address behavioral threats within their school safety plans.
The EdQuest Georgia initiative endorses a three-dimensional view of school safety and student well-being that attends to the physical and emotional well-being of students, fosters safe and supportive learning environments, and fosters stronger interpersonal relationships between students and trusted adults in the school building. While the framework created by House Bill 268 could support local efforts to address student behavioral health challenges, the emphasis on hardening schools could have a counterproductive effect, especially for students of color, students with disabilities, and students living in poverty.
Recommendations for 2026
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Other Bills of Note
House Bill 38 expands the eligibility to the College Completion Grant by lowering the credit-completion threshold down to 70% for four-year programs and 45% for two-year programs. The original law set the threshold at 80% for all programs.
House Bill 192 – The Top State for Talent Act – was one of Governor Kemp’s top education priorities for 2025. The bill requires the State Board of Education to revise the list of Grade 6-12 career-themed programs to include those fields on the state’s High-Demand Career List. The bill also encourages school districts to provide industry credentialing for programs included on the list.
House Bill 340 prohibits the use of personal electronic devices by K-8 students during the school year starting on January 1, 2026.
Senate Bill 82 encourages school systems to approve local charter school application requests. Districts can lose their Strategic Waiver School System waivers if they deny two or more applications later approved by the State Charter School Commission.
Senate Bill 123 addresses the chronic absenteeism crisis by requiring districts to design interventions and supports for students at risk of missing significant time. The bill also requires school systems to convene district attendance review teams if chronic absenteeism rates exceed 10%. According to the data collected by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, only 10 of Georgia’s 180 school districts have chronic absenteeism rates at or below 10%, so there’s much work to be done. Both the House and Senate will convene interim committees in fall 2025 to identify legislative actions to reduce chronic absenteeism rates.
Areas Deserving Attention
In the state budget approved on April 4, 2025, the General Assembly funded three student support grants:
- $19.58 million in student mental health funding to be distributed to the districts by the State Board of Education,
- $15.28 million for districts to support students living in poverty, and
- $12.5 million for afterschool and summer learning.
While the Georgia Partnership commends the General Assembly for investing in these areas for the first time, the funds are not sufficient to support students struggling because of economic or health challenges.
It is important to note that these specific grants exist outside of the state’s K-12 Quality Basic Education (QBE) formula. Therefore, these programs are more vulnerable to cuts when state tax revenues lag.
While we appreciate that legislators are addressing the damaging impact of poverty and the challenges it brings to school systems, we recommend that the General Assembly take future proactive steps by providing funding to support students from low-income backgrounds, either through a poverty weight or a categorical grant.
| Accounting for Student Poverty: Looking to Our Neighbors
According to the Education Commission of the States, 13 southeastern states account for student poverty within their K-12 finance models, with funding ranging from $23.5 million to $456 million. Eight states in the region use poverty weights, a mechanism that provides additional funding based on the number or concentration of students from low-income backgrounds enrolled in a school district. Five states – Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina – use a single weight. Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas use multiple weights to determine funding amounts. Two more states, Alabama and Delaware, use categorical grants – programs that allocate funding for a specific purpose like supporting students living in poverty but not the formula. Maryland and Virginia use both poverty weights and categorical grants, while North Carolina provides funding to hire more teachers in schools that have higher concentrations of students living in poverty. |
Although legislators introduced bills to include a poverty weight in the QBE formula and to increase state funding for counselors by reducing the state ratio, none of the bills passed out of their original committees. As the formula celebrates its 40th birthday this year, the Georgia Partnership encourages the legislature to consider modernizing the formula using the recommendations outlined in the 2015 Governor Education Reform Commission report as a starting point.
Similarly, the legislature did not pass any legislation related to teacher recruitment and retention during the 2025 session. The General Assembly considered bills to increase the number of personal days that teachers can use, expand the Rehire Retiree program, and award stipends for candidates completing student teaching experiences.
Working During the Interim
Legislators meet during the summer and fall to develop proposals that could result in bills being introduced in 2026. The Georgia Partnership has identified several interim committees that align with EdQuest Georgia priorities.
| Resolution | Description |
| HR 711 | Creates the House Study Committee on Student Attendance in PreK-12 Education. |
| HR 887 | Creates the House Study Committee on Reducing and Prioritizing Mandates for Public School Administration. |
| SR 217 | Creates the Senate Study Committee on Combating Chronic Absenteeism in Schools. |
| SR 237 | Charges the Georgia Professional Standards Commission with other state agencies to recommend state legislative actions related to educator workforce and teacher and leader pipeline strategies. |
| SR 431 | Creates the Senate Impact of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on Children and Platform Privacy Protection Study Committee. |
| SR 474 | Creates the Senate Study Committee on Higher Education Affordability. |
| SR 476 | Creates the Senate Study Committee on Local School System Flexibility. |
| SR 489 | Creates the Senate Study Committee on Inclusive Educational Settings for Students with Disabilities. |
The General Assembly’s focus on attendance, literacy, safety, and workforce alignment promotes personal well-being, community resilience, and Georgia’s long-term economic security. However, the Georgia Partnership and its EdQuest Georgia Coalition partners will continue to encourage the legislature to achieve these three objectives by developing comprehensive solutions. By adjusting how the state invests in public education and our teachers, we are more likely to accelerate progress toward the North Star – ensuring 65% of Georgians aged 25 to 64 have earned post-secondary credentials with workforce value by 2033.
Matthew Smith is the Director of Policy and Research at the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.