The Texas House Committee on Public Education is set to take up their most anticipated bill of the session this week: school vouchers.
What the governor calls “school choice” or “education savings accounts,” this bill would allocate public dollars to send some Texas students to private schools or pay for other education-related expenses.
The Senate already passed its version of the bill early in the session and the House hearing on Tuesday is expected to draw lengthy debate from both sides of the issue during the public comment.
Blaise Gainey, who covers the statehouse for the Texas Newsroom, said he expects the meeting to be packed.
“The Texas Freedom Network, that same day, is hosting a rally outside the Capitol. So my guess is it’s going to be a lot of people,” he said. “You’re probably going to hear testimony and the meeting is probably going to last from morning until afternoon. It could go into late night.”
Newly elected House speaker, Dustin Burrows, has publicly committed to passing this bill. Historically, there’s been reluctance in the lower chamber to do so — with rural Republicans siding with Democrats to thwart previous efforts.
Gainey said he doesn’t expect we will know how the bill will fare in the House by the end of the meeting tomorrow.
“I don’t even know if they’ll vote on it tomorrow,” he said. “Last week, when the House heard the school funding measure, they just listened to people for two days and didn’t vote on the bill. My guess is we could see something similar here.
We could see them take it up and vote on it by 2 p.m. But my guess is, with the attention that this bill has gotten, that they’ll want to hear from people and not just seem like they’re rushing this one through.”
The House version of the bill is also different from the Senate version, so if this bill is passed the two chambers will have to iron out those differences before sending it to the governor’s desk.
“(The House version) is a lot different in the fact that the way that students get these education savings accounts is staggered differently. So first is kids with disabilities, they get priority over any other kid. And then it’s kids with low income and then I believe it opens up to all kids,” Gainey said.
“So it’s interesting. But also the funding is different for it. The way that it gets funded is it’s a percentage of what kids would get if they were going to public school.”
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However, Gainey said it’s not as simple as students getting less money under the House version of the bill, since it depends on the student.
“It’s still a little confusing looking at the formulas in the House bill. 85% of what the students get for attending public schools, they’ll get in order to go to a private school, and kids with disabilities actually will get up to $30,000 a year,” Gainey said.
“So there is more money in certain instances. So it’s a little too early to say which plan would get more money for which kid.”
If the committee doesn’t vote on the bill Tuesday, members might chose to do so Thursday, which would clear the way for the full House to vote on the legislation next week.
“That would allow them the chance to pass both the school funding and the school choice bill all together,” Gainey said.
