Governor Ducey announces new teacher deal

UPDATE ( 12:54 P.M. )

Governor Doug Ducey wrote and released a letter to Arizona teachers, parents and education leaders on Tuesday regarding the first step to getting a budget deal.

The Legislature is constitutionally required to read a bill during open session for a three day period and Tuesday was their first read.

They also announced that their Appropriations Committees would meet on Wednesday after which both the House and the Senate will process the bills simultaneously so that they may be expedited for Ducey’s signature.

They are optimistic about this happening as early as Wednesday.

You can read the letter here.

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Governor Doug Ducey announced in a tweet Friday a deal has been reached on a 20 percent pay raise for Arizona educators.

{“url”:”https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/989990952503656449″,”author_name”:”Doug Ducey”,”author_url”:”https://twitter.com/dougducey”,”html”:”&#lt;blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”&#gt;&#lt;p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”&#gt;We are ready to work through the weekend to introduce a budget early next week and pass it shortly thereafter &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/20×2020?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;#20×2020&#lt;/a&#gt; &#lt;a href=”https://t.co/GFIvnRtGBq”&#gt;https://t.co/GFIvnRtGBq&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/p&#gt;– Doug Ducey (@dougducey) &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/989990952503656449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;April 27, 2018&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/blockquote&#gt;n&#lt;script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″&#gt;&#lt;/script&#gt;n”,”width”:550,”height”:null,”type”:”rich”,”cache_age”:”3153600000″,”provider_name”:”Twitter”,”provider_url”:”https://twitter.com”,”version”:”1.0″}

Ducey said the deal is permanent, ongoing, and protected in the base formula. He said it will include $100 million in additional dollars for support staff, increasing to $371 million for five years. He also said they wouldn’t need a tax increase in order to make this happen.

Teachers across the state have rallied for the past two days for better school funding and pay raises.

Local school districts throughout the county have closed their doors as rallies continue.

We will continue to update this article with the latest information as it comes into our newsroom.