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Legislative liaison warns of special session, voucher scholarship proposal and several education bills
Summary
At the Lakeland Board of Education meeting, Legislative Liaison Michelle Childs briefed the board on a Jan. 27 special session that will include a proposed school-voucher scholarship program and noted other bills already filed on cellphones in schools, end-of-course testing and school board recall.
Michelle Childs, the board’s legislative liaison, told the Lakeland Board of Education at its January meeting that the state legislature has called a special session for Jan. 27 that will include a proposed voucher scholarship program and two other topics.
The vouchers proposal “would be vouchers to attend private school using public funds,” Childs said. “They want to start with 20,000. Half of them will be income limited, but even the income limit is 173,000 for a family of 4, and the rest of them will have no income limit, and there's basically almost no accountability.”
Childs said the voucher proposal would not require current statewide assessments such as TCAP but would rely on “some standardized test.” She also said the committee structure for the special session may be different from the regular session and that TSBA (Tennessee School Boards Association) is tracking developments and holding briefings for members.
Childs summarized other bills already filed: several that would require local school boards to adopt policies on wireless devices and at least one bill from Rep. Kirk Haston that would allow ACT or SAT results to be used in place of state end-of-course (EOC) assessments. She also reported a recently filed bill by Rep. Hardaway on recalling school board members.
Board members asked clarifying questions about how the special session would operate and about the EOC proposal; Childs said the EOC bill is intended to have the State Department of Education request an ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) amendment to permit post‑secondary tests to substitute for some EOCs. Childs said she will forward TSBA updates to the board as information becomes available.
The discussion was informational; no board action was taken on the bills at the meeting.
