The board of trustees of the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) will convene in Austin for its last board meeting of the year starting Thursday morning, Dec. 12, 2019, and wrapping up Friday afternoon, Dec. 13.

The proceedings will begin at 8 a.m. Thursday with meetings of the following board committees: the Strategic Planning Committee; the Benefits Committee; the Budget Committee; the Investment Management Committee (IMD); the Policy Committee; and the Audit, Compliance, and Ethics Committee. Committee agendas can be found at the links above. After the committee meetings conclude, the full board will convene briefly before going into executive session for the rest of the afternoon. On Friday morning, the full board will reconvene and take up its public agenda.

After taking public comments and making some recognitions, the board will discuss TRS space planning needs, including where the agency may be housed in the future. Other items on the agenda include a review of the TRS Pension Trust Fund Actuarial Valuation for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2019, and consideration of adopting the funding policy for the TRS pension fund. The funding policy is a written plan that provides a road map for how TRS can get to 100 percent funding of its pension liabilities and includes consideration of how and when TRS might provide a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for retirees.

It's important to note that actuarial soundness and being 100% funded are not based on the same metric. The fund is considered actuarially sound under state law when its funding period is below 31 years, at which point TRS has typically been funded at around the 80 percent level. However, there is not an exact correlation between the number of years it takes to reach full funding and the percentage at which TRS is funded.

Click here to access links to the livestream of the Thursday and Friday TRS meetings.