Now you see it, now you don’t: Universal voucher legislation disappears from bill hopper

For a few fleeting moments, this year’s most controversial legislation – Gov. Bill Lee’s universal school voucher bill – was dropped into the stack of filed bills. And then it was suddenly gone.

The “Education Freedom Scholarship Act” sponsored by Senate Republican leader Jack Johnson of Franklin appeared as SB2095. A short time later, the measure was replaced on the Legislature’s website as a different bill sponsored by Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, aimed at halting the “risk of foreign influence” on academic research.

The legislation was filed inadvertently due to a miscommunication, a Senate spokesman said. The proposal will be filed again later with a different bill number. The governor is expected to give more details about the plan in his State of the State address on Feb. 5.

The version that was temporarily filed largely restated the broad strokes that the Lee administration has presented in public so far. It mentioned nothing about accountability standards for private schools that accept the state money, nor did it lay out the funding mechanism for the program.

The vouchers would not be available to parents who homeschool their children outside of church or other educational organizations. And students currently enrolled in the Education Savings Account program in the Chattanooga, Memphis-Shelby County and Nashville school districts would not be eligible for the new program.

In the first year of the expanded voucher program, 10,000 slots would be reserved for people in families making less than 300% of the poverty rate, while another 10,000 would not be income restricted. In the second year and beyond, priority would be given to families making double the poverty limit before opening to anyone else who wanted to participate.

House Republican leader William Lamberth of Portland told reporters last week that whatever was filed on the voucher proposal would be "skeletal" in nature.

“I don’t anticipate what we’ll be filing will by any means be the final product," he said. "It will continue to be a work as we go through the committee process.”