CAMPAIGN PRIORITIES
Three commitments to the people of District 3, and the specific things I would do about each one.
THE SHORT VERSION
SUPPORTING LOCAL SCHOOLS
Catoosa's schools do not have a spending problem, they have a funding problem, and the formula that causes it was written in 1985.
READ THIS SECTIONEXPANDING LOCAL HEALTHCARE
There is nowhere in this county to take someone in a mental health crisis, and the bill that would help medical debt here is sitting in the Senate with no House sponsor.
READ THIS SECTIONPROTECTING LOCAL CONTROL
I support tools like FLOST, but a ballot should tell the whole story, and Atlanta shouldn't hand Catoosa new rules without the money to pay for them.
READ THIS SECTIONGeorgia's school funding formula was written in 1985. Catoosa County has been paying the difference ever since.
Catoosa County Public Schools don't have a spending problem, they have a funding problem. For too long, Georgia has followed a "starve and blame" cycle: underfund public schools, call them broken, and then use that as an excuse to divert public money into private hands. Catoosa County has lived this firsthand, and I will be a firewall against it.
Georgia's school funding formula was written in 1985 and has barely changed since. It does not account for the real cost of health insurance, retirement contributions, transportation, or school safety today, and it actually punishes growing communities like ours: when local property values rise, the state quietly pulls funding back out the other side. The result is a district that runs lean (administrative costs are below the state average) while still facing real budget gaps, year after year, through no fault of local leadership.
I believe in accountability, transparency, and sound budgeting. But accountability has to be honest about where the pressure is actually coming from. I will not support piling additional unfunded mandates and political punishment onto a district that is already absorbing state cost increases it never created, because every dollar spent proving what we already know is a dollar not spent in a classroom.
Every child deserves access to a quality education, every teacher deserves support and respect, and every community deserves schools that are set up to succeed. I will fight to keep public funds in public classrooms, modernize Georgia's outdated education funding formula, and make sure it reflects the real costs schools face today. The answer is not looking for the exit. The answer is doing the hard work of investing in our future.
Modernizing the funding formula sounds abstract until somebody puts numbers on it. There are two levers here that the legislature controls outright, and both of them run on figures out of Catoosa County's own FY27 budget.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
Georgia stopped paying the employer share of health insurance for classified school employees back in 2012, and the school district has covered it locally ever since, about $11 million a year. If the state picked that back up in full, the board could take 3.26 mills off the school rate.
Statewide that would run about $1.4 billion, and it would not have to come out of the regular school funding budget.
The state assumes Catoosa County chips in five mills' worth of local property tax, then subtracts that from what it owes the school district. The rate itself is locked in by law, but the property values it gets applied to keep climbing, so the amount subtracted grows every single year without anybody voting on it.
Dropping that floor to three mills would leave the school district roughly $3.1 million a year better off. It is a change to the funding formula rather than a new line in the budget, which is a different and frankly easier thing to ask for.
Catoosa funds about 80% of the cost of having a nurse in every school. The state picks up the rest. We know our kids need nurses in schools, and the state decided only to pay for a sliver of one. Georgia hasn't updated its rules for funding nurses in years, even as nurse costs have gone up, and statewide, only 37% of schools have a full-time nurse every day.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
It's a simple fix — change one number in the law. No district loses money; it just means the state pays more of its fair share.
Right now, if a school's enrollment drops even a little, the state can cut its nurse funding automatically. That shouldn't happen by accident.
Right now one nurse can be stretched across 1,500 middle and high schoolers. I'd push to bring that number down so every school has real coverage, not just a number on paper.
Georgia funds one school counselor for every 450 students. The professional standard is one for every 250. Catoosa pays local money to staff a little above the state ratio, and covers about a third of its psychologists and social workers the same way, because the formula stops short.
Georgia already lets schools bill Medicaid for nursing, but not for counseling or therapy unless the child has a special education plan. Other states made that switch years ago and now pull in millions of federal dollars for school mental health. Georgia hasn't, but we can.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
It would cover every student on Medicaid or PeachCare, not just those with a special education plan, and only with a parent's OK. The federal government pays most of the bill, and no district has to participate if it doesn't want to.
Right now it covers middle and high schools only.
The state's largest educator association has asked for a first step, and I'd vote for it.
The first thing teachers here tell me about is not pay. It is a student with extreme behavior problems, and nobody to call. Catoosa schools let a teacher remove a disruptive student, and the principal cannot send that student back over the teacher's objection. What teachers need is not another law giving them permission. It is a person in the building who can take that child and work with them so the teacher can get back to the other twenty-four. Other states have passed laws like that and handed teachers authority with no money behind it. I will not vote for one that does that here.
A Georgia teacher pays six percent of every paycheck into the Teachers Retirement System and is promised a pension in return. The employer share of that promise has gone from about nine percent of payroll in 2009 to more than twenty-two percent today. Every few years somebody in Atlanta proposes closing the plan to new teachers or trimming what it pays. The last serious attempt, in 2019, did not pass after teachers filled the committee room, but it is the kind of proposal that tends to come back.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
A teacher who signed up under one set of rules retires under them.
The state's own Department of Education has asked for a $10,000 raise over five years and for the salary schedule to keep climbing past year 21, where it stops today. PAGE has asked for the same extension, and I would vote for both.
Classified employees are in a separate, much thinner retirement system. A bill to let them choose TRS instead cleared a Senate committee this year and died on the calendar, and the Department of Education asked for it too. It deserves another vote.
WHAT THAT WOULD BE WORTH TO YOU
Pick the home value closest to yours
$293,967 is the median home value in Catoosa County.
These come off the annual school property tax on a $293,967 home, if the board passes the savings through. It votes on millage every year and that is not automatic.
Figures come from Catoosa County's FY2027 adopted budget and the state's own GaDOE earnings sheet. The full breakdown, with every source and sliders to try other scenarios, is at civicsbyspear.com/catoosa-funding.
What a seat in the Georgia House can actually fix, and what I would do about each piece of it.
Access to healthcare should not depend on your ZIP code, your income, or which side of the state line a doctor chooses to practice on. Families in Catoosa County deserve care that is affordable, transparent, and close to home.
I am running for a seat in the Georgia House. That job does not let me lower your premiums or make a hospital build something it does not want to build. What it does let me do is fix specific things in Georgia law that are hurting people here, and I have taken the time to find out what those are.
Catoosa County should not be left behind because Atlanta refuses to look closely at what life is actually like on the Tennessee line. Here is what I found, and what I would do about it.
If somebody here is in a mental health crisis and a deputy shows up, the law says that deputy has to take them to the nearest hospital the state has approved to receive them. There isn't one in Catoosa County, and there isn't one in Walker, Dade, or Chattooga either.
There is a psychiatric hospital just seventeen miles up the road in Chattanooga, but a deputy cannot take anyone there. Not because crossing the state line is against the law, it isn't, but because Georgia's rules say an approved hospital has to be in Georgia. The list of approved facilities stops at the state line, and a Tennessee hospital cannot get on it.
So the choices are Dalton, twenty-five miles away, where they can look at somebody but cannot treat them, or Rome, fifty-six miles away, where they can. Rome and back is a two-hour trip, which is two hours that deputy is not in Catoosa County, and it is a big part of why people in crisis end up sitting in the county jail instead.
Georgia has built or announced seven crisis centers around the state, and the farthest north of them is in Marietta, so between Cobb County and the Tennessee line there is nothing at all. The state's own study says we need eight more by 2032.
This is not a partisan finding. The Republican chairman of Senate Appropriations said on the floor in February that Georgia's county jails have become the state's mental health hospitals. The president of the Georgia Sheriffs' Association has said no mentally ill person gets better in jail.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
Seek an emergency receiving facility designation for the hospital in Ringgold. Georgia's rules permit designation of an acute care hospital that has no psychiatric unit, and the state's application form includes that category. The obstacle is funding rather than law, and funding is a legislative question. I will request a written determination before taking office.
Pursue a behavioral health crisis center for Northwest Georgia in the state's next round of siting decisions.
Modeled on Minnesota Statutes § 245.50 and North Dakota Century Code § 25-03.1-34.2. Those laws permit transport to a contracted facility in a state next door while the patient remains in the legal custody of the sending state, under that state's due process and time limits. Georgia has never introduced such a bill. It would require companion legislation in Tennessee.
Most hospitals have a program that will reduce or forgive your bill if you cannot afford it, but nobody is required to tell you it exists, and nobody has to check whether you qualify before the bill goes out. So people who could have gotten help end up in collections instead.
Georgia Watch looked at 111 nonprofit hospitals across the state back in January, and at most of them you have to be making about twenty thousand dollars less than it actually costs to live here before you qualify for any help at all.
Senator Chuck Hufstetler, a Republican from Rome, filed a bill in March that would make hospitals check first, but it never got a vote, and nobody filed the matching bill over in the House.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
Requiring a hospital to determine whether a patient qualifies for financial assistance before it issues the bill rather than after it files suit.
Four health care bills got through at least one chamber by enormous margins, and not one of them is law today.
| BILL | ISSUE | WHAT IT WOULD DO | VOTE |
|---|---|---|---|
| HB 520 | Mental health | Count how many crisis beds Georgia actually has and find where the gaps are | House 163–3 |
| HB 1295 | Cross-state licensing | Let a physician assistant licensed in Tennessee work in Georgia without starting over | House 157–3 Senate 49–0 |
| SB 131 | Provider shortages | Track where Georgia is short on doctors, nurses, and other providers | Senate 49–1 House 166–3 |
| HB 1262 | Insurance accountability | Raise the penalties on insurers that illegally deny mental health coverage, from $2,000 to $10,000 and from $5,000 to $25,000 | House 170–1 |
Six Republicans sponsored HB 1262, including the House Insurance chairman over in Floyd County, and if you add up every no vote across all four of these bills, you get a grand total of eleven. HB 520 is the cheap one. You cannot build crisis beds where they are needed until somebody counts where they are not, and that is all it asked the state to do.
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
They are drafted, they are bipartisan, and they have already cleared a chamber.
I would rather pass one narrow bill that actually helps somebody in Northwest Georgia than give a good speech about a big one that never moves and has no action behind it.
Sources are listed at the bottom of the page. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it.
Local tax tools work. They only work honestly when voters get the whole story before they vote.
The people closest to a community should have a real voice in the decisions that shape it. My job as state representative is not to go to Atlanta and claim power for myself, but to work alongside the local leaders our residents have already chosen to make sure Catoosa County's needs are heard at the state level.
I support tools like SPLOST and FLOST that give communities real options for funding local priorities and providing property tax relief. Putting a question like that in front of voters is the right instinct. But those decisions only work if voters have the full picture: who benefits, who bears the burden, and what happens when the economy turns. I won't bring a measure to voters that only tells half the story.
When Catoosa County voters recently approved a property tax exemption for seniors, the ballot didn't say it would permanently remove $3 million per year from the school district budget, or that other homeowners would see their millage rate go up to cover the difference. That's the other half of the story, and voters deserved it.
The real answer to property tax burden is updating the QBE formula so the state funds a larger share of public school costs. I'll push for that in Atlanta so Catoosa County residents see genuine, lasting relief without local governments being forced to choose between services.
I'll also stay in direct communication with local officials and won't drop legislation affecting Catoosa County without talking to county and city leaders first. Good government should be accountable, transparent, and grounded in the real needs of the people who live here.
Catoosa County votes on a penny sales tax this November, and it would cut the county property tax rate by roughly 90 percent while not touching school taxes at all. About one in four households here rent, so those folks would pay the extra penny at the register without a property tax bill coming back the other way. All of that is true at the same time, and a voter deserves to hear all of it before deciding.
We already know what happens when they don't, because when Catoosa voters approved the property tax exemption for seniors, the ballot never said it would permanently pull about $3 million a year out of the school district budget, or that other homeowners' millage would rise to cover the difference. That is not a technicality, it is the other half of the story, and people voted without it.
It's the same problem one level up. Across Georgia, the state's share of what it costs to run public schools fell from more than half in 2014 to 40 percent in 2024, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. Districts like Catoosa have covered the difference with local money, and over the same stretch the General Assembly has kept adding requirements. I would vote against unfunded mandates. A legislator from this district should ask two questions before voting for any new rule on local schools: Who pays, and did anyone ask the people who have to carry it out?
MY PLAN IN ATLANTA
Ballot language should be an accurate reflection of what a measure actually does, all of it, and it should not be written to push voters toward a yes or a no.
If a measure changes what a school district gets, the ballot should say so, and if it shifts the burden from one group of taxpayers onto another, it should say that too. People here can handle the whole picture, they just have to be handed it.
No more unfunded mandates handed down to our district.
I will not drop legislation affecting Catoosa County without talking to county and city leaders first — that conversation happens before the bill does, not after.
The job is not to go to Atlanta and claim power for myself, it is to work alongside the people our residents already elected and make sure this county's needs get heard where the decisions are made.
Catoosa's school board elections have been nonpartisan for more than a decade, and they should stay that way. The people who show up at a board meeting are parents and grandparents, not parties, and the ballot should look like the room.
ON YOUR BALLOT THIS YEAR
Catoosa County votes on the 1% FLOST on November 3. I put together a plain breakdown of it: what it does, what it does not do, what it means for renters and for homeowners, and a calculator for your own household. It does not tell you how to vote, and it is not going to.
SEE THE FULL FLOST BREAKDOWN →"I believe the government should be accountable, fiscally responsible, and focused on solving real problems for the people it serves."— MARGARET SPEAR
MY COMMITMENT
I'm running to bring thoughtful, steady leadership to Atlanta, focused on what works for us here at home. I will always be transparent, accessible, and ready to be held accountable.
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