THERE IS STRONG research evidence that minority students benefit from being in a classroom with a teacher of their background, but Pavel Payano says he knows it from on-the-ground experience.

As an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who arrived in Lawrence at age 6 with his parents, he saw the difference Hispanic teachers made for students like him in the Lawrence Public Schools. What’s more, both his parents went on to be those role models. Payano’s father recently retired after 25 years as a history teacher at Lawrence High School, and his mother just finished her 30th year there teaching AP Spanish. 

“I always get stopped by their former students,” Payano said, recounting conversations he often has had on the streets of Lawrence. “Your mother, your father, they meant a lot to me,” he said people would tell him. “They understood what I was going through. They talked to my family about why it was important for me to go to college.” 

Now a first-term state senator representing Lawrence, Methuen, and part of Haverhill, Payano is cosponsoring legislation he says is vital to preserving recent gains that have been made in diversifying the teaching force in Massachusetts schools. The bill, cosponsored with state Rep. Priscilla Sousa of Framingham, would give administrators facing layoff decisions more leeway to retain teachers from “underrepresented” groups or those with dual language backgrounds over those with more seniority, the factor that currently determines most layoff decisions. 

“We’re making all these efforts to recruit them,” state Rep. Rita Mendes, a first-term Brockton lawmaker, said of minority teachers. “And then they’re the ones that are leaving,” she said of the more recent hires who are the first to be let go in any layoffs.

The bill, which was part of a legislative hearing on Monday of the Joint Committee on Education, is getting strong pushback from teachers unions, who question the idea of giving more say over staffing decisions to the same administrators who they say for years failed to do more to diversify the teaching ranks in their districts.

Unions are backing a different bill, sponsored by Sen. Jason Lewis, co-chair of the education committee, that aims to bring in more teachers of color by creating alternative certification pathways. 

The bill sponsored by Payano and Sousa, “in my mind, is the wrong medicine for the wrong problem at the wrong time,” said Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “We are desperately, in most places, trying to fill positions up and down the workforce. The real issue is a growing educator shortage.” 

Districts have faced dire teacher shortages in recent years, but advocates for the bill warn that the situation could soon change dramatically. They say many districts are on the verge of a fiscal crunch from declining enrollment, inflation, and the end of federal COVID relief funding that has provided a big financial cushion over the last three years.  

The crunch has already arrived in Brockton, where the district is facing an $18 million budget deficit and recently announced 130 teacher layoffs for the coming school year. Figures provided by the district bear out the concerns that teachers of color will be disproportionately impacted by layoffs. 

Of the educators receiving layoff notices, 67 percent are White and 33 percent are teachers of color. The overall Brockton teaching force is 72.5 percent White and 27.5 percent educators of color. 

“The superintendent said his hands are tied,” said Mendes, the Brockton representative, who testified this week with Payano and Sousa in favor of their bill. 

A report released earlier this year by TNTP, a national education group that is backing the bill along with the advocacy organization Educators for Excellence, said teachers of color in Massachusetts are more than twice as likely to be in their first or second year of teaching as their White counterparts, the highest gap of any state. 

In a poll released this week by Education Reform Now Massachusetts, an affiliate of Democrats for Education Reform, a slim majority of Massachusetts voters (51 percent) said they would support “changing seniority rules to help keep highly qualified teachers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.” Thirty-eight percent said they would oppose such a change, according to the survey, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group, an affiliate of the public policy think tank MassINC that publishes CommonWealth. 

Sousa, who immigrated to the US from Brazil when she was 12, said it’s critical to not backslide on the recent gains in diversifying the state’s teacher workforce. “I understand the arguments about keeping seniority,” said Sousa, who also chairs the Framingham school committee. “I’ve been speaking to the MTA. But if we have groups of children who feel underrepresented, the ends don’t justify the means.”