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
Read original article by clicking here.