Amendment 3 promises Louisiana teachers a permanent $2,250 pay raise. It does not fund that raise with new money. It funds it by liquidating $2 billion from three constitutionally protected education trust funds — money that today pays for early childhood education, struggling schools, and scholarships. That is not a raise. That is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Teachers deserve better. Louisiana deserves leadership, not a shell game. Vote NO on Amendment 3.
Amendment 3 liquidates three constitutionally protected education trust funds — the Education Excellence Fund, the Louisiana Education Quality Trust Fund, and the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund, collectively worth about $2 billion — and transfers their entire balance to the Teachers' Retirement System of Louisiana (TRSL) to pay down pension debt ahead of schedule. The theory is that school districts will see lower pension bills as a result, and that those savings will fund a permanent $2,250 raise for teachers and $1,125 for support staff.
The three funds being liquidated currently pay for early childhood education, programs for struggling schools, scholarships, endowed professorships, and graduate student recruitment. The amendment's own fiscal note concedes that the state will lose $68 million per year in recurring education funding, that expenditures will increase while revenues decrease, and that the exact net cost cannot be quantified. If the projected savings fall short — as state analysts concede they may — the state is on the hook to make up the difference out of the Minimum Foundation Program.
Louisiana teachers deserve a raise. They deserve it badly and they deserve it now. But they deserve a real one — funded by a recurring revenue source, not by cashing out a savings account their grandchildren were supposed to inherit. This is robbing Peter to pay Paul. And Peter is every Louisiana kid currently in pre-K, every struggling school receiving remediation funds, every graduate student on a state scholarship. Vote NO on Amendment 3.
Individually, each of the five amendments on the May 16 ballot can be debated on its own merits. Read together, they form a pattern. Each one takes a short-term political win and hands it to someone specific at the cost of long-term structural health for everyone else. Amendment 3 is the one the state is counting on you to see in isolation — as if it were about nothing but teachers. It is not. It is the fiscal illusion in the middle of a five-act play.
Short-term political wins. Long-term structural costs. Someone, somewhere, is paying for each of these. And that someone is almost always you.
A real raise comes from a recurring revenue stream. This raise comes from liquidating trust funds that were themselves one-time deposits (tobacco settlement, offshore mineral settlement). Teachers get a raise today. Nothing guarantees it exists in 2030.
The Education Excellence Fund, the LEQTF, and the Quality Education Support Fund were placed in the Constitution specifically to prevent the Legislature from spending the principal. Amendment 3 writes that protection out of the Constitution.
Step 1: drain trust funds. Step 2: pension debt shrinks. Step 3: "savings" pay the raise. No new dollar was created. The math is reallocation, not revenue.
Once the $2B is spent, it is gone forever. When the trust-fund interest stops flowing, the Legislature must cut spending elsewhere, raise taxes, or cut the raise. Today's raise becomes tomorrow's budget crisis.
The amendment's own fiscal note says the state will lose approximately $68 million per year in recurring education spending — money that currently funds pre-K, struggling-school programs, and scholarships. That is Peter.
The Legislature's own fiscal note concedes that expenditures will INCREASE while revenues DECREASE — and that state analysts cannot determine by how much. Constitutionalizing policy the Legislature's own staff cannot price is not responsible governance.
TRSL is 77.6% funded as of 2024. That is below fully funded, but well above crisis thresholds. Amendment 3 pays down some debt faster. It does not address contribution formulas, actuarial assumptions, or structural sustainability. A partial fix marketed as a solution.
Louisiana teachers deserve a real raise paid for with real money. This is a one-time withdrawal dressed up as a paycheck. Vote NO on 3 — and demand a real raise on a real funding source in the next session.
Screenshot this. Post it. Tag us #RobbingPeterToPayPaul and #VoteNoOn3.
This is the exact language published by the Louisiana Secretary of State. Notice what it promises. Notice what it does not promise.
"Fund a $2,250 teacher pay raise." "With monies from certain constitutional funds." Sounds like the state found spare change between the couch cushions and decided to give it to teachers.
The "certain constitutional funds" are three separate trust funds worth approximately $2 billion. They currently pay for early childhood education, struggling-school programs, scholarships, endowed professorships, and graduate student recruitment. The ballot does not mention any of this.
| Fund | Established | Source of $$$ | What it funds today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Education Excellence Fund (EEF) Art. VII, §10.8 |
1999 | 75% of 1998 Louisiana tobacco-settlement payments | Elementary and secondary education programs; early childhood education; academic improvement grants. |
| Louisiana Education Quality Trust Fund (LEQTF) Art. VII, §10.1 |
1986 | Outer Continental Shelf mineral-revenue settlement with the federal government | Higher education — endowed professorships, graduate student recruitment, research support at Louisiana universities. |
| Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund Art. VII, §10.16(A)(9) |
2000s | Non-recurring mineral/investment revenue | Support for K–12 academic programs and testing; capital and innovation investments. |
These funds were not an accident. Louisiana voters specifically approved constitutional amendments in 1986, 1999, and the early 2000s to place their principal beyond the reach of the annual appropriations process. The protection was the whole point. Amendment 3 asks voters to repeal that protection so the principal can be spent.
HB 473 was introduced by Rep. Julie Emerson (R-39, Carencro) on behalf of Gov. Jeff Landry. It is a pared-down version of a far more sweeping "Louisiana Forward" tax overhaul that Louisiana voters rejected 65%–35% on March 29, 2025. The Legislature returned with the same idea stripped of the most controversial pieces: a straight-up raid on the education trust funds, rebranded as a teacher raise.
The House passed it 95–1, then 92–0 after Senate amendments, then 97–0 on final concurrence. The Senate passed it 39–0, then 37–0. A nearly unanimous Legislature, on a policy voters just defeated at the ballot, sending it back to voters on a different ballot.
Read the full Act: Act 222 of 2025 Regular Session (HB 473) · Secretary of State official ballot guide (PDF)
The mechanism is deliberately complex because the simple version doesn't sell. Here is the simple version. Follow the dollar.
No new dollar is created. Paul gets paid. Peter gets robbed. That is the transaction.
| Step | Action | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | State Treasurer liquidates the three education trust funds by May 31, 2026. | $2B cash transfer to TRSL. |
| 2 | TRSL applies the $2B to its Unfunded Actuarial Accrued Liability (UAAL) — the pension debt school districts are currently paying off. | TRSL pension debt shrinks faster than the original schedule. |
| 3 | School districts' required pension contributions to TRSL go down over time. | "Savings" appear in local district budgets. |
| 4 | Districts are required to use those savings to fund the $2,250/$1,125 raises. | Raise is paid. |
| 5 | If the savings don't cover the raise — "and state analysts concede they may not" — the state must cover the shortfall through MFP increases. | General Fund expenditures go up. Again. |
| 6 | The $68M/year of recurring education funding that the trust funds used to generate — is gone. Forever. | Pre-K slots, remediation, scholarships: funded out of the General Fund now, or not at all. |
Read that twice. The people whose job it is to calculate what a bill will cost Louisiana cannot calculate what this bill will cost Louisiana. They can say only that it costs more than it raises. The Legislature voted to put it on the ballot anyway. Nearly unanimously.
A fiscal cliff is what happens when a government commits to permanent spending from a non-permanent revenue source. Eventually, the source runs out, and the spending doesn't. Louisiana has walked off fiscal cliffs before — most recently in 2015–2018, when a temporary "clean penny" sales tax was supposed to expire and leave a $1 billion hole that legislators then scrambled to plug.
Amendment 3 builds the next cliff deliberately. In the first ten years, the trust-fund principal pays down TRSL debt and the interest on that accelerated paydown offsets the raise. At some point — exactly when depends on investment returns and actuarial assumptions the Fiscal Note could not pin down — the mathematics stop working. When that happens, the Legislature has four options:
In Louisiana, history suggests (d), followed eventually by (c).
Every argument on this page is grounded in a single premise: Louisiana's public school teachers are underpaid, the state has known it for a generation, and the Legislature has responded with three consecutive years of "temporary stipends" instead of doing the obvious thing and funding a real, recurring raise. Amendment 3 is the fourth iteration of the same pattern. It is dressed up as permanent. Under the hood, it is a one-time cash-out of an asset that cannot be cashed out twice.
According to the Southern Regional Education Board, the average Louisiana public school teacher earns approximately $56,000 per year. That is:
After taxes and retirement contributions, a $2,250 gross raise works out to roughly $130–$150 per month in take-home pay. That is not nothing. It is groceries. It is a utility bill. It is a little bit of breathing room. Nobody on this site is dismissing what $150 a month means to a family. What we are saying is:
A real teacher pay raise, funded properly, would include any of the following:
This is where this campaign is unusual, and where we want to be absolutely honest with you: the two largest Louisiana teacher-union organizations, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT) and the Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE), have both endorsed Amendment 3. Their reasoning is straightforward: after three years of stipends, something "permanent" on paper is better than another stipend. We respect that reasoning. We disagree with it.
We disagree because "permanent on paper" is not the same as "permanent in practice." We disagree because even LFT's own president, Larry Carter, told the Legislature in his own words that educators cannot rely on good intentions alone and publicly preferred a funding mechanism that is not in this amendment. We disagree because the funding mechanism that is in this amendment — liquidation of the trust funds — has never before been proposed as a solution to any other problem in Louisiana, and it is being proposed now only because voters rejected the cleaner version of this plan in March 2025.
Teachers: you are not the target of this campaign. The Legislature is. If this amendment fails, the Legislature has every ability to return in 2027 with a real raise on a real revenue source. If it passes, the Legislature will declare teacher pay "solved" and move on — with a fiscal cliff growing under your contract.
Every major faith tradition in Louisiana teaches stewardship — the moral obligation to preserve what has been entrusted to us for the generation that comes after. The trust funds Amendment 3 proposes to liquidate were created by people who understood stewardship. They set aside one-time windfalls (a tobacco settlement, an offshore mineral settlement) and placed the principal beyond the reach of annual political pressure specifically so the interest could fund public education forever. Amendment 3 asks voters to undo an act of stewardship that predates most of our service in ministry, politics, or civic life.
Proverbs 13:22 is the stewardship verse that says the plain thing out loud. We are supposed to be leaving an inheritance to our children's children. These trust funds are literally that inheritance, set up by a prior generation for a future generation. Amendment 3 proposes to cash it in.
You do not need to take a partisan position to teach stewardship. Amendment 3 is, before it is anything else, a question of whether a people entrusted with a one-time inheritance are faithful stewards of it. We have prepared a pulpit insert, non-partisan in tone, grounded in scripture, with room for adaptation to your congregation. Our hope is that you read it alongside your study text and consider including a word on stewardship in the weeks before May 16.
Printable, non-partisan, scripture-grounded, with a call to prayerful voting.
Full citations, primary sources, and comparative analysis. Written to be quoted and forwarded. Each paper stands alone and is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license.
A line-by-line walkthrough of the mechanism. The Fiscal Note. The TRSL math. Why the Legislature's own analysts say expenditures increase while revenues decrease.
The Education Excellence Fund (1999), the LEQTF (1986), and the Quality Education Support Fund — where they came from, what they fund today, what vanishes if they are liquidated.
What Louisiana teachers actually earn, what a permanent salary parity plan would cost, and how peer Southern states have structured their recurring teacher-pay funding.
Louisiana's history of funding-mismatch cliffs (2015–2018 "clean penny," the 2020 Medicaid expansion match), what a pension-paydown cliff looks like in year 10–15, and what the exit options are.
The constitutional argument: Louisiana's adequacy obligation under Article VIII, the repeal of a protection voters specifically adopted, and the doctrine of constitutional prudence.
Press contacts, quotable paragraphs, full source list. For journalists on deadline.
These dates are published by the Louisiana Secretary of State. Amendment 3 requires only a statewide majority — there is no parish-level veto on this one.
The hardest vote to earn on Amendment 3 is a teacher's. Not because teachers don't care — because both big unions endorsed it. Share this site. Ask them to read the "Teachers Deserve Better" tab. Trust their judgment.
Avoid weather, avoid lines, avoid "something came up." Frees you to drive others on May 16.
One reminder before early voting. One before Election Day. That's it.
Every amendment on the May 16 ballot was placed there by the Legislature — not by the people. Louisiana is one of only a handful of states without a citizen-initiative process. The Legislature decides which constitutional questions reach the ballot. The people vote yes or no on what they are handed.
That is why we are asking you to do two things. Vote NO on Amendment 3. And then stay with us, because the larger project — the project that outlives any single amendment — is winning Louisiana the right to place proposals on our own ballot, the way voters in 26 other states already can. Amendment 3 is exactly the kind of complicated fiscal maneuver the people would never place on a ballot themselves. Giving us the power to propose would also give us the power to propose alternatives: a real teacher pay raise, on a real funding source, without dismantling a thirty-year education inheritance to get there.
Your signature is public advocacy. It will be part of a citizens' petition we intend to present to legislators during the next Louisiana legislative session calling for a constitutional amendment establishing citizen initiative. We do not sell, rent, or share this data. We do use it to show the Legislature the real, named weight of demand for a people's right to petition.
Questions, arguments, stories from Louisiana teachers, parents, retirees, and finance folks. Civil disagreement welcome; harassment and bad-faith posts are not. If you are a teacher who disagrees with us and plans to vote YES on 3, we especially want to hear from you.
When Amendment 3 fails, the Legislature has every option to come back next session with a real teacher pay raise on a real funding source. We will be at the Capitol making that case. Join us. Add your name to the Citizen Initiative Petition above — the first brick in the next wall.