Education legislation that will provide Colorado teachers with pay incentives and student-loan forgiveness received Gov. Bill Owens’ stamp of approval Friday.

According to a press release from the governor’s office, Senate Bill 98 — a $52.4 million initiative — will reward outstanding teachers with merit-pay bonuses and provide recruitment bonuses to encourage "the best and brightest" teachers to serve in challenged schools and in hard-to-recruit subjects like math, science and special education.

The bill also institutes a four-year pilot program to recruit teachers for low-performing schools and hard-to-teach subjects.

In addition, it provides public schools with low and unsatisfactory overall academic performance with a block grant of $30,000 per year.

Additionally, each first-year instructor teaching in a qualified position may also receive up to $2,000 each year in student-loan forgiveness for up to three years.

Montezuma-Cortez School District Superintendent Bill Thompson said there is a strong likelihood that Re-1 will see some of the $52.4 million, but the possibility hinges on the outcome of the accountability report due out Sept. 15.

"I think there’s certainly a possibility," Thompson said. "It just depends on how our (CSAP) scores compare with the rest of the state."

Schools will be given a rating of either excellent, high, average, low or unsatisfactory, as determined by the CSAP tests students took statewide in February. The schools’ overall scores will be converted into a bell curve with the "low and "unsatisfactory" schools receiving the bulk of the funding.

Thompson said the recruitment aspects of the bill will be helpful but added that the teaching profession needs to be more attractive in other respects besides salaries and bonuses.

"The recruitment for teachers will be really important for any of us who can receive some of this money, because it’s just getting more and more difficult to find numbers of people. But along with recruitment, we’ve got to make the profession one that a lot of young people want to go into because we’ve got to have good candidates," he said.

"We’ve got to make the profession more conducive to our young people. . . and one of the things they’ll look at is salaries, but that cannot be the only thing. There’s got to be a personal satisfaction and a desire to work with kids."

Thompson said he believes merit-based incentives are good in theory, although he said the state has yet to establish a system to implement the money.

"I think it can help in any area of the state if there’s a way to determine who should receive that merit-pay bonus and who shouldn’t. It’s not like an assembly-line production where you can measure that a teacher has produced a certain number of products per day or per hour."

Other changes under Senate Bill 98 include:

• Changes in terminology on accountability reports. "A" is now "excellent," "B" is "high," and so on.

• Accountability reports will be released no later than Sept. 15. This change allows schools to administer the CSAP in March or April instead of in February.

• Implementation of a committee to look at students whose dominant language is not English.