Senate Panel Gives School Choice Bill Nod
in Move that Ensures Snail's Pace in House
Capitol Inside
January 29, 2025
A Texas Senate committee put a perennial school choice proposal on a fast track on Tuesday night when it approved the measure that GOP leaders have formally dubbed as the Texas Education Freedom Act.
The Education Committee ended a nine-hour hearing when it backed Senate Bill 2 on a 9-2 vote that was cast exclusively along party lines in a move that sent it to the floor for debate next week. All of the panel's seven Republicans voted to advance the vouchers bill while the committee's only two Democrats opposed it.
GOP State Senator Brandon Creighton of Conroe sponsored the education savings accounts plan in SB 2 in his role as the Education Committee chairman. Creighton hailed the panel vote as "a significant step forward in expanding educational opportunities" for students in the Lone Star State.
“The status quo is failing too many Texas families, and parents are demanding change. SB 2 delivers that change, ensuring every child has a path to academic success,” Creighton said. “This bill is about unleashing the potential of every student—no matter their zip code or background.”
Creighton said SB 2 would culminate in the "largest day-one launch" of a school choice program in the U.S. The Montgomery County lawmaker said the bill would give 100,000 students the ability to attend private schools with annual allotments of $10,000 from the state.
Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Dan Patrick both consider school choice to be their number one priority for the regular session in 2025.
Patrick revealed other major priorities on Wednesday with a ban on cannabis products with THC - the active ingredient in marijuana that can be produced from hemp as well.
Patrick wants to shut down an entire industry that he had a pivotal role in creating here several years ago with the legalization of products made from hemp. The THC prohibition that Patrick envisions is contained in Senate Bill 3.
Patrick also is touting bills that would raise the homestead exemption for property taxation to $140,000, combat Alzheimer's disease and dementia, boost the Texas power grid's reliability, expand the state's water supply and provide assistance for the federal government in the implementation of President Donald Trump's deportation plan. Bail reform and a Ten Commandments mandate for Texas public schools round out the lieutenant governor's top 10 priorities based on the bill numbers that he's assigned to them.
The Texas Senate president for the past 10 years, Patrick has vowed to move the school choice plan through the upper chamber with breakneck speed. The lieutenant governor isn't concerned that the House has a habit of moving as slowly as possible on legislation that Patrick's Senate sends over as quickly as it can.
Patrick has bragged that he's passed school choice bills out of the Senate five times or more. But the vouchers measures have always died up to now as a consequence in large part of the Senate Republicans' failure to find ways to pass priorities across the rotunda through the art of compromise.
Creighton indicated that students from low-income families and those with special needs would have the best shot at private school subsidies from the state in SB 2's current form. But the Republicans who backed the Creighton plan in committee appeared undaunted by opposition that SB 2 has sparked from the far right in the past two days.
Some key conservative activists say the funding in SB 2 is woefully inadequate and the legislation has too many strings attached in the form of regulations and rules for private schools and home-schooling that's had no oversight from the state up to now.
The Senate expects to approve SB 2 on the floor after Abbott clears the way for an early vote by declaring school choice as a legislative emergency in a State of the State speech on Sunday.
more to come ...
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