It didn’t take long for the bickering to start after the Senate Education Committee on Feb. 3 unanimously killed House Bill 2, the wide-ranging school choice proposal, with only two minutes of consideration.
Gov. Tate Reeves said he’s never been more disappointed in elected officials than he was in Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, the chairman of the Education Committee. The governor claimed the two worked closely with Democrats to kill the school choice bill and accused them of hiding their efforts from conservatives.
If Reeves and other school choice advocates are upset with Hosemann and DeBar about school choice, they should broaden their horizons a bit. The House bill, championed by Speaker Jason White, passed his chamber on Jan. 15 by a slim 61-59 vote. That means about 15 of the 78 Republicans in the House voted against the bill.
School choice advocates are right to complain that the bill didn’t get a fair hearing in the Senate. But all 10 Republicans on the Education Committee voted to kill the legislation. Combined, that means at least 25 GOP lawmakers voted against the bill.
A couple of senators told the Magnolia Tribune website why. They said Republicans had concerns about using state money to help students switch to private schools. They also noted that there was no detailed estimate of what House Bill 2 would cost.
Finally, Senate Republicans said they got a lot of calls from constituents who opposed the school choice bill. Presumably that was true for some House Republicans as well.
White may have made a strategic error by putting together a bill of more than 500 pages. If his thinking was that a bigger bill stood a better chance of becoming law, he apparently guessed wrong. The Senate’s action on its school choice proposals indicates it wants to handle the issues individually. Even the House vote indicated Republican concerns.
DeBar, the Education Committee chairman, noted that the Senate has passed its own school choice legislation. The Senate’s proposal does not go as far as House Bill 2 did, restricting choice to giving parents the freedom to switch from one public school to another, as long as the receiving school agrees. But it’s a start. After all, if the House bill was that immaculate, why did so many Republicans vote against it?
