healtheduscience

=The Senate Committee on Health, Education, and Science=

Committee Chair: Senator Drumm (D-CO) Committee Members: Senator Conrad (D-OR), Senator Kendrick (D-WI), Senator Brown (D-TX), Senator Summitt (R-CA)

Committee Reports and Bills
Read the bills passed by this committee below. The committee's report is included.


 * S-2: AID PROGRESS and PRODUCTIVITY IN THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Sponsored by Senator Conrad

Committee Report:** Today the APPLE Bill passed because it was deemed an important topic. However there were some concerns and revisions were concerning funding and the specifics of how the student to teacher ratio was going to be reduced. All of these concerns are now in the revised copy of the bill. For funding the No Child Left Behind Act was previously responsible for funding for the standardized testing provided to the public schools, increasing teacher salary, and making the teacher qualifications of teachers harder. These issues were addressed in the No Child Left Behind Act and were also supposed to be funded by the federal government. However they have not funded for all of these criteria and the state government does not have the amount of money to pay for all of their public school systems with these new requirements. If the federal government continues to neglect their end of the act, there is a new system that could be enacted. Currently the federal government is giving 15 billion dollars to Agricultural subsidies annually. The majority of this money is given to huge corporations for them not to grow crops. The federal government doesn’t want them to build buildings on this land and also does not want the economy to go down. If the federal government were to tax 10% of the 15 billion dollars that they give to the Agricultural Subsidies, there would be 1.5 billion dollars to split up amongst the 50 states. That would be 30 million dollars per state alone for education. People that are in college to become teachers have an idea of what they believe teaching will be like, however, in most cases, they’re incorrect in their assumptions. For this and to tackle the problem of how to reduce the student to teacher ratio colleges should require their students to be a teacher’s assistant. This TA would get a whole bunch of experience and the federal government would not have to pay them because it would be part of their education. The TA would be completely informed of the curriculum, but the actual teacher would have designed it. The TA would be able to answer questions that students have and therefore the students would have two teachers to meet with when they are having trouble. And all of these issues were addressed and written into the new revised APPLE bill. S-5: S.C.A.R.E. sponsored by Senators Joseph and Brown

** Committee Report This bill did not pass committee for several reasons. Committee did not pass this bill because it had major reservations. We are not sure if the United States is ready to fund this bill right now since it would be expensive to fund all the research that does not use animals as research tools. Some of the committee members described it as "too idealistic" and thought that there were too many loopholes. Although the bill did not pass committee, some suggestions for changes were to use the money from fining facilities that do not uphold the SCARE ACT of 2008 to pay for alternative research methods and to offer refunds for mishaps on products such as cosmetics that cause harm since the product was not tested on animals first. There were four votes against the bill and one vote to pass the bill, resulting in the bill not passing committee.