HELENA, Mont. (NMB) – A bill introduced in a legislative committee Monday would build on a state program aimed at recruiting and retaining quality educators in rural Montana through student loan assistance and other incentives.
As Shaylee Ragar with the UM Legislative News Service reports Representative Llew Jones, a Republican from Conrad, is carrying House Bill 211, which would make loan assistance payments to teachers tax exempt. It would also allocate $400,000 for districts with teachers who qualify for loan assistance to help incentive those teachers to stay.
Executive Director of the Montana School Boards Association, Lance Melton, spoke in support of the bill.
“The smaller and more rural you get, the more critical your circumstances generally are.”
The existing, but unfunded, Quality Educator Loan Assistance Program allows an educator at a school with a critical shortage of teachers to get loan assistance from the state for up to three years. A school district is defined as critically needy if it struggles to fill open positions.
Another bill will deal with allocating funds to this program
