Arise’s David Stout welcomes everyone to the Alabama Legislature’s 2025 regular session. Watch to see what to expect and learn about parental leave, school breakfast and other key issues where we hope to make progress this year.

Remember to sign up for our action alerts. And you can read more about our 2025 legislative priorities.

Hello, I’m David Stout, the legislative director for Alabama Arise, and I’m here to give you a brief look at the upcoming 2025 legislative session. The session begins Tuesday, Feb. 4, and the Constitution prescribes that the Legislature must meet over 105 days. There are actually 30 so-called working days where they meet, debate, and vote on bills in a session.

There are many issues that are very important to Arise members, and we need to be aware of them and be able to give our input as this session proceeds. During the first week, the budget presentations before the Legislature will occur on Feb. 5 and Feb. 6. These budget hearings, for the first time, are wrapped into the session and will include presentations by financial directors, state departments, education— a whole variety of departments in state government.

Especially important this year, and critical to making Alabama a better state, are three key issues that Arise will be working on. One is parental leave, which we hope will give parental leave for the first time in Alabama to state employees and educators. Secondly, we will be offering a plan to incentivize schools to provide breakfast for all students in public schools in Alabama. Lastly, we will continue our efforts to see that Alabama joins the majority of other states and expands Medicaid to give health coverage to over 200,000 Alabamians who do not have it.

Arise will also be working on a broad agenda in the Legislature, including criminal justice reform, seeking funds for public transportation, maternal and infant health care, voting rights, death penalty reform, and pushing to take more taxes off groceries.

We will keep you posted as we move through this session. It’s extremely important that you stay engaged, and the way to stay engaged is to be conscious of the Arise action alerts. We hope you participate, we hope you contact your legislators, and we think it’s important that you meet with your legislators personally. It’s going to be a difficult session, but Arise is working, we think, for the betterment of the people of Alabama.