Efforts to ease the public school transfer process for K-12 students in Mississippi have failed in the state capitol.
Earlier this legislative session, the House of Representatives passed a bill removing some of the guardrails surrounding the transfer of a pupil from an educational center receiving taxpayer funds to another, marking a win for the pro-school choice crowd. Specifically, House Bill 1435, granted parents the ability to unenroll their child from one public school and send the pupil to a different taxpayer-funded educational facility without needing approval from the school losing the student.
The bill made no headway in the Senate and was killed by the chamber’s education committee in early March, meaning it did not go to a floor vote. But House education leaders, particularly Republican Reps. Janson Owen, R-Poplarville, and Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, did not surrender.
Ahead of the House bill being discarded, lawmakers in two of the chamber’s committees revived their legislation by gutting a Senate bill and inserting HB 1435’s language, a move not uncommon in the later stages of the session.
“The goal of this bill is to eliminate hang-ups that are currently keeping students away from districts that their parents might choose to send them to,” Owen said in February.
“Under current law, if I decide to send my child to another school, and that school accepts my child, my school district is allowed to veto my decision as a parent and tell me that I cannot send my child to that other school district. This [bill] will be eliminating the veto power that the sending district has.”
However, the House allowed the measure to die on calendar on Wednesday.
Though this may leave some scratching their heads and wondering why the side in favor of easing this regulation would relent, the legislation was essentially destined to fail in the Senate. Roberson, the House’s Education Committee chair, feared that the Senate would challenge the revision’s relevance to the initial bill, SB 2618, which dealt with school attendance enforcement and dropout prevention.
This session looks to be a wash concerning attempts to create more options for parents over where they send their children to school, but school choice advocates in the legislature have vowed to continue their push in future years. This even includes the prospects of expanding charter schools statewide.
House Speaker Jason White, R-West, did not mince words when airing out his grievances with the Senate’s handling of legislation in the school choice category. The second-year speaker blasted Senate education leaders and the chamber’s presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, for their alleged failure to even sit down with House leadership for a discussion about ways to give parents more educational opportunities for their youth.
“All of that legislation found its way to slow and quiet deaths in the Senate without even so much as a vote, debate, hearing, or anything. It’s one thing to say you’re for something, but at some point, leaders in the Senate, including in the lieutenant governor’s office, have to either be for it or against it. Unfortunately, their actions show that they are against it,” White said.
“That is a direct opposition to the direction our new president is leading our country. I think it’s unfortunate for Mississippians that, at this point, that message has fallen on deaf ears on the other end of the [capitol]. Parents will wait another year for education freedom, it looks like.”
The infighting between the two sides of the capitol on school choice is likely to carry over into future legislative sessions.
