Committee considers bill to require residency verification for dual-enrollment students

The House Higher Education Committee on Wednesday heard testimony on HB 18, a bill the committee’s sponsor said would require verification of legal Georgia residency for students participating in dual-enrollment programs, a change the sponsor said would align residency checks with current out‑of‑state tuition standards.

The measure’s sponsor (identified in the hearing only as the bill sponsor, a state representative) told the committee that dual enrollment is “a highly valuable program” whose costs have grown and that the bill aims to resolve what the sponsor described as “constitutional ambiguity,” citing the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe as background for how K–12 residency rules have been interpreted. The sponsor told the panel that about 428 of roughly 21,000 dual‑enrollment students — about 2…