The Tennessee General Assembly votes on the Education Freedom Scholarship Act this week after Gov. Bill Lee called a special session to address the controversial bill and hurricane relief for northeast Tennessee.
The act would divert at least $144 million from state funds for parents to send kids to private K-12 schools, an idea that divided the Republican supermajority and sparked an outcry from Tennesseans.
Lee, who began pushing for state-funded vouchers last year, called the act “a full commitment to both choice for parents and our existing public school systems” in an interview this week with Memphis radio station NewsTalk 98.9. He believes vouchers empower parents to have more control over a child’s education.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats like Rep. Bo Mitchell share concerns that vouchers divert funds from struggling public schools. Proponents also argue that the act will assist families who otherwise could not afford private school.
“Gov. Lee has had months to provide hurricane relief to northeast Tennessee… to wait this long and combine it with vouchers – that should offend everyone. It’s a political tactic,” Mitchell said on Jan. 15.
On this topic, opposition does not stop at the House floor.
Alexis Smith, a Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship major at MTSU, joined nearly a hundred students, teachers and parents in protesting vouchers at the Tennessee capitol in Nashville on Tuesday.
“If [private school] was a better education, I would totally understand, but there are statistical results showing it’s not,” Smith said. “Statistically, private schools have lower test results, [and] even if they do have a higher satisfaction rate from parents, it’s not higher satisfaction rates from students.”
If passed, the act would offer a $7,200 voucher to at least 20,000 Tennesseans for private school tuition, with the first 10,000 scholarships being awarded to students “whose annual household income does not exceed three hundred percent (300%) of the amount required for the student to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.”
For example, a family of four can make no more than $173,000 yearly to qualify for the first 10,000 vouchers. The remaining scholarships contain no eligibility restrictions.
During Tuesday’s House committee meeting, a member mentioned that the highest private school tuition in Williamson County is nearly $22,000 annually, Smith said.
“What is $7,000 going to do to someone who can barely afford to pay bills? Nothing,” Smith said.
However, nearly 50 private schools in Tennessee cost less than $7,200 this year, according to data from The Private School Review.
Opposition to the bill led to an unlikely and fragile truce between Democrats and Republicans, like Republican Rep. Todd Warner, who published an op-ed in The Tennessean disparaging the Education Freedom Scholarship Act earlier this month.
“When Governor Lee talks about ‘school choice,’ I have to ask, who is this choice for?” Warner wrote. “Because right now, it looks like our tax dollars would be “choosing” to leave small towns like mine to prop up private schools in big cities, leaving rural schools holding the bag.”
(Noah McLane)
Education Freedom Scholarship Act and social workers
The EFSA impacts social workers working within the public school system, according to Vickie Harden, MTSU’s interim chair for the Department of Social Work.
“[School social workers] work directly with the students in special needs classrooms, but they also work in regular settings,” Harden said. “For example, they may be doing bullying prevention or support groups for students [who] have specific needs. I think that [the EFSA] would add a burden to what social workers do in the public setting.”
Some rural communities in Tennessee may have only one social worker for all the public schools in that county, Harden said. The EFSA says, “A voucher recipient does not retain the right to receive special education services from the local education agencies in which the recipient resides.”
“I think that for many of our rural counties…the school systems are already struggling, and there are no private schools in some of these counties for students to have the option for,” Harden said.
Out of 95 counties in Tennessee, only 76 have private schools within their borders.
Despite the potential shake-up, MTSU remains dedicated to preparing the “best teachers in Tennessee, no matter if they go into public or private [school],” according to the Elementary and Special Education Chairperson and a graduate professor and chairman at MTSU’s college of education Eric L. Oslund in an interview.
The General Assembly is scheduled to vote on the bill Thursday.
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