AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – The Texas Senate on Thursday approved a major voucher plan offering state funding to children attending private and religious schools – but only after slashing its potential cost by limiting the number of eligible families and exempting rural areas, which opponents argue can least afford losing students.
Sen. Larry Taylor’s bill creates publicly sponsored education savings accounts for parents while offering tax credits to businesses that sponsor private schooling via donations. It appeared stalled before the Republican from Friendswood agreed to make wholesale changes.
“Our public schools have all the incumbency advantages. They have the facilities, they have the activities and, frankly, for many places, it’s the center of the town’s activities,” Taylor said Tuesday. “But there are some students in those schools that that’s not the best environment for them.”
His overhauled proposal no longer applies to communities with fewer than 285,000 residents and includes caps ensuring that only low-income families are eligible, except in cases of students with special needs who could get funding to enroll in private schools regardless of their family’s income.
After hours of debate, the revised version passed 18-13 in the GOP-controlled Senate.
It now heads to the state House, which is also Republican-majority but is far warier of vouchers. So-called “school choice” has long been defeated by Democrats and rural Republicans in that chamber who fear harming public schools that are top employers for – and often form the lifeblood of – the small communities they represent.
Scaling back the voucher plan reduced the cost from $100-plus million over the life of the two-year Texas budget cycle to less than $10 million, Taylor said. He said he believed only as many as 75,000 students would apply for educational savings accounts or scholarships out of the state’s roughly 5.2 million public school students.
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have voucher programs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of those began with relatively modest plans, like the one Taylor is now pushing, only to expand them in subsequent years.
Teachers groups’ oppose vouchers, saying they’ll squeeze funding from public schools while disproportionately hurting struggling classrooms that are often located in poor and heavily minority parts of Texas.
“You can put lipstick on the voucher, but it’s still a voucher,” said Houston Democratic Sen. Sylvia Garcia, who voted against the bill.
After it was approved, Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, released a statement saying: “Education is a right for every Texan that democracy depends on, not a market for Republicans to make a quick buck.”
But Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, responded with a statement of his own calling school choice “the civil rights issue of our time.”
Last session, the Senate approved a more ambitious school voucher plan, but it never made it to a House vote. In 2013, the House overwhelmingly passed a budget resolution that public money should stay in public schools.
Taylor said he made changes so his bill might have a chance in the House. “We’re trying to make it where everyone likes this bill,” he said.
Still, Houston GOP Rep. Dan Huberty, head of the House Public Education Committee, said the voucher bill as originally proposed wouldn’t pass. And even the revamped version will have to wait as the House focuses on updating the state’s long-troubled school finance system.
Last summer, the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court ruled that the way Texas funds its public schools was constitutional – though deeply flawed.
That spared the Legislature from being forced to devise a new funding system. The House is attempting small but important fixes anyway, but those may not survive the Senate, where vouchers have taken priority.