I was pleased to have Jordanne Howe, the State FFA president from SDSU, shadow me and learn more about the legislature and how it works.
On Thursday, we heard two separate bills in House Health and Human Services. The first one was on midwifery, which established a statute in our code to allow Certified Professional Midwives to deliver very low risk babies at home.  It passed out of committee pretty easily, and will be on the floor next week.
The other bill dealing with dyslexia, was heard a second time as there were so many proponents for it, it had to be split into two days. After a lot of deliberation, that passed out of committee. Many parents that have dyslexic children, have found out the schools may test for it but are not required to. This bill would require that schools test for it. Many of you have contacted me on that issue. I will keep you posted on the progress of the bill.
Later that afternoon, we took up the House Bill 1182.  That had been deferred by the 5-17 rule again on Tuesday. That action can only be used twice on the same bill, so it was calendared for Thursday. As I had discussed previously, there were several amendments. The first one which we considered, made the collection of the half cent sales tax be compliant with the Streamline Sales Tax Initiative. There were at least 10 amendments that were drawn up, but the main two we took up on Thursday, dealt with reallocating money to the four South Dakota technical schools from the $40 million in extra money collected in the potential  half cent sales tax increase.
The second amendment was a lengthy process to find a way to make sure the majority of the increased revenue from this sales tax collection would go directly to teacher salaries. I decided after much careful thought, it didn’t seem right that we collect an additional half cent sales tax for teacher pay and then redistribute 40 percent of it to other groups that had not been identified in the Blue Ribbon report as having requested any assistance, nor was it a goal of the Blue Ribbon panel.
I was one of the 23 No votes, as I believed we should look within our means to find efficiencies in the budget before we passed this $107 million dollar tax increase, which would have been the largest ever in the history of our State, and 40 percent of the collected tax wasn’t even going to K-12 teachers.
Many of you have contacted me thinking I voted against teacher pay, but I voted against the method of how we would increase teacher pay. I am committed to finding the source to fund the much needed increase. This will be a long process and please understand this is not a simple up or down vote.
Once we make this decision, we will move on and try and address all the other issues that we have before us. I appreciate your respectful  feedback.  It has been a difficult 10 days for me. You can contact me at rep.heinemann@state.sd.us

Week six saw a number of long debates on bills in both the House and Senate, the use of a seldom used rule to delay a bill from being heard, and the defeat of the Governor’s Education Funding bill.
In the Senate, HB 1008, the so-called Transgender Bill, was debated on Tuesday.  After a long and, at times, tense debate, the bill passed 20 to 15. The bill is now on the Governor’s desk waiting his action. The Governor has five legislative days to sign or veto the bill. If the bill is vetoed, it is likely there will be an attempt to override the veto. If the Governor signs the bill, HB1008 will become law.
On Thursday, Feb. 11, the House was scheduled to take action on the Governor’s Education Funding bill, HB 1182. This is the bill that would increase sales and use tax by half a cent. The House action, however, was delayed by the use of rule 5.17. This rule allows for a non-debatable motion to delay action on a bill until the second legislative day after the motion was made. This motion requires one-fifth of the body’s support or 14 House members.
Because the Legislature was in recess until Tuesday of the past week, the bill was scheduled to be heard on Feb. 16, but rule 5.17 was once again enacted, and the bill was delayed again until Thursday, Feb. 18, when action was taken on the bill. After more than an hour and a half of debate, the bill failed to get two-thirds support by one vote.
A House member gave notice of his intent to have the bill reconsidered, which was voted on last Friday and received enough votes for reconsideration. The bill was heard for the fifth time on Monday, Feb. 22. Normally, I wouldn’t include dates of all the action taken on bills, but this bill has had a long history already and it isn’t through the first House. The effort over the weekend has been to find at least one vote to move the measure to the Senate for continued debate.
While there was other floor action on bills in both the House and Senate this past week, these two bills were the most controversial and commanded the most focus.

My first days as teaching principal at Forestburg beginning in August of 1967 don’t conjure up many memories regarding personnel issues. Superintendent Knut Holmstrom was in the last of his three years at the same time I was in the first of my three years as principal. Harvey Preble served as coach and math teacher; Allis Fairfield as American and World History teacher and librarian. In my high school days in 1942-45, the library had a quiet attraction for me. Long and narrow with bookshelves lining the south wall and part of the north side, it was a small haven for readers. Coming out of one of Floyd Township’s five country schools, I had never seen such a vast array of books, possibly 500 or so. In those days, the library seemed generally unsupervised, since only two teachers and the teacher/superintendent T.E. Sather were on hand to manage the upper floor. We checked books in and out quite on our own, as I recall. I’ll not forget the mystery/mayhem novel “Black Caesar’s Clan” by Thomas Payson Terhune, with its orange cover and water moccasin intrigue inside. I read it several times.
Access to the library from the study hall was obtained by pushing open a swinging door perhaps 30 inches high, a novelty quite absent from the starkness of design of a country school with one room. By the time I returned in August of 1967, that door in the northeast corner had been removed to allow free entry to the library. In later years, when diminished enrollment brought an end to the Forestburg School, I made a small discovery, relevant only to myself. As I rummaged in the attic prior to the auction sale of various school items, I found an item dust covered and forgotten—the former swinging library door. It was long gone and forgotten except as it stirred my memories of days gone by. And in those memories were Bertha Joerger, Marg Lefler, Alfred Long, Gene Ellingson, Cork Petesch, Mary Hinde and a bunch of others.
Now back to the staff I would be working with in 1967. Dennis Schutt instructed English III and IV, speech and high school music. Behind the study hall in the typing room was first-year teacher Margaret Long, who was assigned four commercial classes. I joined the teaching ranks, having been assigned U.S. government, biology, and English I and II. Those were the old days. My college major had been biology, a minor was English, but for government I had no college preparation and only one semester of high school government a quarter of a century prior. Interestingly, I thought that perhaps I did my best teaching in government—student opinions not included! In those days, a teacher could possibly end up teaching outside his studied field simply because when school commenced, there was an unfilled position. If that teacher had had reasonable previous teaching success, he or she was deemed capable of adapting to the circumstances of the moment.
Remembering teaching assignments without college preparation takes me back to Woonsocket Rascal #1 of one of my former stories. It was he who told me that I’d be teaching government. In the previous summer he had insisted on my teaching French. That was his trade-off for honoring my request to move from the elementary ranks to the high school where the pay was better. Former readers will recall that my one year of high school French and one year of college French had run their life expectancy some eleven years in the past. During that interval, I had not spoken a sentence in French, nor could I.
Elementary teachers in 1967, all pros and in need of little supervision, consisted of Lucille Murtha, Margaret Zoss, Elvina Moe, Vera Fouberg, Martha Bergeleen, and my wife, Luella (Lolly), who taught remedial reading and, later on, elementary music and elementary library supervision. Lolly’s teaching room was in the imported Rhoads schoolhouse, one of two rural buildings moved in from the country. To the south stood the Maurer School in which my wife conducted elementary music classes.
The 1967-68 school year was generally uneventful with genial, slender, white-haired Mr. Holmstrom keeping the educational process on an even keel. On the school board were Bill Hinker, Harold Edwards, Jim Davis, and the two who approached me about replacing the departing Floyd Elenz, Ray Judy and Orville Schefsky. Jim, to my knowledge, is the lone surviving board member.