Reforming public education will be the state’s top priority this year.

That is according to state lawmakers who spoke at a SC Press Association legislative workshop in Columbia last week.

“I don’t think Santee Cooper is going to suck the air out of the room,” said Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy of Lexington County.

“I think after SCANA and Dominion, we’re tired of energy,” she said, referring to the nuclear debacle SCANA handed to its and Santee Cooper’s ratepayers.

Teacher pay, retention and recruitment, facilities and spending more time teaching than testing and filling out paper work were priorities they outlined to media on the Statehouse grounds.

South Carolina ranks last in starting teacher pay in the Southeast.

State colleges graduated 1,900 teachers last year, but the state lost 4,900, they said.

“What we owe every student is a quality, qualified teacher in every classroom,” said Orangeburg Democratic Sen. Brad Hutto, a member of the Senate Education Committee. “We don’t have that now.”

“We tend to govern by crisis,” he said.

“First it was pensions, then roads, then SCANA.

“Every year, if you asked us what the top priority was, we’d have said education, but we didn’t do anything about it.”

That won’t be the case in 2019, the lawmakers agreed.

Lawmakers said they will tackle how to improve a broken education system and crumbling facilities and how to pay for them fairly.

“If we ask teachers what they want, they want money,” Shealy said. “But I think teachers want to teach.”