Incumbent Bob Deuell, a Greenville physician, said he doesn't need to speak on the Senate floor to show leadership. When a problem or a disagreement arises, he said, he prefers to get together with those involved and resolve it.

He said he was one of the first to come up with the "cafeteria" approach to broadening the business tax - letting companies choose how they pay state taxes - that would reduce Texas' reliance on local property taxes for education.

Challenger Tim McCallum, a communications company executive and Rockwall City Council member, said a leader should take a more active, visible role. As a former school board member, Dr. Deuell should be more involved in solving the school finance problem and restructuring property taxes, he said.

The senator pointed to his work on health care - he was named vice chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee in February - as evidence of his ability to direct policy. For instance, he wrote a bill that would allow disabled people whose incomes exceed cutoffs for Medicaid coverage to pay for it on a sliding scale.

Mr. McCallum offers no specific solutions to school finance but said he couldn't support the proposals introduced so far. He said the best way to bring additional dollars into the classroom is for districts to reap savings in other areas - for example, by working together as they contract with vendors. "What you get is scale - to leverage that scale for better prices and for more efficiency," Mr. McCallum said.

Mr. McCallum criticized Dr. Deuell for supporting a bill that lifted the requirement for local authorities to publish notices in newspapers when sex offenders move into an area and left notification about high-risk offenders to the state. That was one provision of a broad overhaul of the state's sex-offender registration law.

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