Statehouse Express: S4, E7
Hi I’m John Elcesser, Executive Director of INPEA. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Statehouse Express!
We are currently almost ¾ of the way through the 2023 Legislative session. We have 3 more committee meetings for House and Senate Ed this session. Last week, as I mentioned in our last episode, the Senate Sub-Committee on K-12 school funding met. Over 100 individuals signed up to testify and the committee met for 5 hours to hear testimony.
There was a great deal of testimony in support of all types of choice: Charters, Vouchers, and ESAs. And of course, there was also testimony in opposition to choice. The same individuals or groups that usually oppose choice continue to make their same arguments. No accountability, students don’t do better and too much money. The main argument outside of the regular negative narrative involved the percentage increase in the budget for choice scholarships compared to the percentage of the increase realized in public schools. The increase in projected choice scholarship funding goes from the current 307 million to 522 million in the first year of the biennium to 594 million in the second year.
Even if we acknowledge that this is a large increase, it still only reflects 6% of the total K-12 funding in the first year of the biennium and 7% in the second year of budget. This compares according to their numbers that we will be educating a projected 8% of the total K-12 enrollment with the support of the choice scholarship program in the first year of the budget and 9% in the second year. Over the 2 years of the biennium, the choice scholarship allocation amounts to only 2.6% of the total 43 billion budget.
In the coming weeks, the Senate will release its version of the budget which we assume will look very different than the House’s version. Some of the difference, no doubt, will include changes to the choice expansions. This is why we are asking that non-public school advocates and our stakeholders reach out to their Senators to ask that they champion the school choice expansions in the House budget.
This week the House and Senate education committees met and addressed a number of bills.
In the House Ed committee:
Senate Bill 168 – requires the department of ed, when contracting with state assessment vendors, require those vendors to provide a summary of student’s statewide assessment results. The hope is, I think, to ensure that parents have understandable information available that helps explain how their children are performing on the assessment. The bill passed out of committee 11-0
SB 342 – which deals with hiring practices and defines what types of offenses or crimes should exclude a teacher from employment. The bill allows school boards to request a waiver on some offenses, but others more serious offenses are not waivable. It passed out of committee 12-0
SB 100 was introduced and testimony was taken. In addition to providing some timelines for the State Board to approve the recognition of new third party accreditors, it also requires the state board to revise the current diploma requirements. It is unclear what that might look like but supposedly it is intended to ensure better alignment with graduation pathways by allowing more flexibility for workforce development opportunities.
Senator Linda Rogers’ bill, SB 369, was also heard. It deals with automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, and having access readily for both athletic and more physical extracurricular activities. There must be a workable AED within 3 minutes of any athletic or physical extracurricular event. There was some concern about funding in the discussion. There was a mention about the possibility of including it as an allowable expense for school safety grants.
On the Senate side, the Senate Ed committee heard 6 bills. One bill of interest for INPEA was HB 1591 which included a number of choice fixes. It was amended to remove the fees language. We are not sure why, but we are assuming that it would probably meet resistance in Senator Mishler’s Appropriation committee. We are hoping we can get it put back in during conference committee.
Another bill of interest was HB 1609, originally labeled by opponents as a “Don’t Say Gay Bill”. This bill was already amended in the House to change the language around sexual orientation and gender identity to prohibiting the instruction of human sexuality in PreK – 3 Grade. Non-public schools were amended out of this part of the bill but we were amended into another part of the bill dealing with use of pronouns or names not aligned with a child’s birth sex. It required parent consent to do so. Non-pubs were inadvertently included in this part of the bill. In some ways it may not be problematic but for many of our faith based schools, even with parent’s consent, schools would not be willing to use pronouns and names not aligned with a child’s birth sex so we don’t want to create the perception that that would be the case. Again, we are working with the author to leave nonpubs out of both parts of the bill. Time will tell.
Please watch for legislative alerts as we gear up for the Senate to release its version of the budget. We will need all our advocates to engage if we are going to get these expansions to the finish line.
Things will be moving into high gear soon! So let’s do this!
We hope to see our all of our friends at our next two “Celebration of Choice Rallies” in Evansville and Highland. Thanks again to our hosts in Fort Wayne and South Bend. Bishop Dwenger and St. Joseph High Schools. Two successful events!
That’s it for now! See you back here next week for a new edition of the Statehouse Express.
