School Voucher Plan Moves to the Floor of the House

People gather at the Texas Capitol to advocate for sufficient school funding (photo by Brant Bingamon)

Rep. James Talarico went to one of his better voucher arguments at a meeting last week of the Texas House’s public education committee. Talarico asked rhetorically if there is a provision in the voucher bill, Senate Bill 2, to stop wealthy people from receiving taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private school. He used a particular example.

“Elon Musk is a Texas resident, so would he theoretically be eligible to apply for these funds?” Talarico asked the author of the voucher bill, Republican Rep. Brad Buckley.

“Yes,” Buckley said.

Talarico noted that Musk has 14 children. “Eight of them are under school age. So let’s say he gets a voucher for each of those eight children. That’s over $80,000 a year in taxpayer funds, more than what most teachers make. So if he sent them to a private school from pre-K to senior year, that’s a total of $1.2 million in taxpayer funds for Elon Musk.”

If it was a persuasive argument, it was lost on the Republican members of the committee. An hour later, they voted to advance SB 2 to the floor of the House along party lines, nine to six. The bill is expected to be debated in the House next week.

If passed, SB 2 will allow families in Texas to receive at least $10,000 of taxpayer money per year, per kid, for use in private schooling. The money would be paid into bank accounts, known as education savings accounts, managed by for-profit companies. The bill allocates $1 billion in taxes for the program in its first two years but includes provisions for rapid expansion afterward. The state estimates vouchers would cost about $4.4 billion per year by 2030.

The public education committee members made several changes to the previous version of the bill, adding a provision to allow only U.S. citizens or those in the country lawfully to receive voucher money, seemingly a response to conservative criticism that undocumented immigrants could take advantage of the proposal. The revised bill also temporarily limits the number of wealthy families that could receive vouchers to 20% of the program’s billion dollar budget, but just for its first two years. Thereafter, billionaires would have full access to it.

The representatives also voted to move HB 2, the school funding bill, to the House floor with a couple of important additions. The new HB 2 increases the basic allotment, the amount of money the state provides to school districts per student, from the previous figure of $220 to $395. The bill also automatically increases the allotment every two years, something school advocates have long sought, by indexing it to rises in property values.

However, public education supporters want a much larger increase to the basic allotment. At the Save Texas Schools rally held on the south steps of the Capitol on Saturday, they demanded that lawmakers increase the allotment by $1,300 per student and vote down vouchers.

About 100 supporters joined the local school union, Education Austin, to march to the rally from Kealing Middle School. Union President Ken Zarafis made brief remarks before they departed. “This legislature thought that they had vouchers done,” Zarafis said. “This governor thought it was a done deal when the session started. It’s not done, it’s not passed. Why? Because people are fighting.”

At the rally, the marchers joined over 3,000 demonstrators there for the Save Texas Schools rally (before the larger Hands Off! Protest of the Trump administration), according to rally organizer Allen Weeks. They heard from elected officials, including U.S. Reps. Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar, Texas Reps. Vikki Goodwin, Donna Howard, James Talarico, and Erin Zwiener, and school district employees and teachers, who urged them to continue calling the offices of the Republicans who may be persuadable on vouchers.

Daphne Hoffacker of the Austin Council of PTAs is organizing local school supporters to make the calls. Last Friday, she sent out contact information for 25 Republican representatives who are believed to be anti-voucher or on the fence. Voucher opponents need 14 of them to vote no if they are to defeat the proposal.

“SB 2 is not an inevitability,” Hoffacker said. “We have the power. There are more of us than there are of them. We still see lots of courage in Texas, we still see representatives out there who are willing to put their constituents and their public schools ahead of their state leaders’ priorities.”