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Tennessee lawmakers kicked off a special session on school vouchers, disaster relief, and immigration Monday, with GOP leaders signaling that they want to pass all three legislative packages and approve nearly $1 billion for them by Friday.
Meanwhile, hundreds of students from Nashville converged on the Capitol to demand that the legislature address guns and hate with the same urgency, just days after another deadly school shooting in their city.
That won’t happen.
Gov. Bill Lee called for the session and set the agenda. His Education Freedom Act is expected to dominate discussion, nine months after a similar proposal stalled in legislative committees.
The governor wants to spend $447 million next school year to provide vouchers to 20,000 families to spend toward private school tuition. The legislature’s financial analysts say the cost of the program, if approved, could top $1.1 billion during its first five years, with 65% of the vouchers going to students who already attend private schools.
The voucher vote is expected to be close in both chambers of the legislature, where a coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans oppose the plan.
But on the session’s first day, the Republican-controlled House adopted rules to restrict debate time and expedite business, so that bills can reach the floor quickly after passing through a committee. During regular sessions, that process can take weeks and even months.
House Speaker Cameron Sexton also appointed special GOP-dominated committees to vet the bills and named Rep. Scott Cepicky, a voucher supporter from Maury County, to chair the education panel.
“The fix is in,” said Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democrat who chairs his chamber’s caucus.
“If you paid any attention, you saw brand new committees formed, subcommittees eliminated, and unreasonable time limits on amendments put into place in the rules,” Clemmons said. “There is no way that the people of Tennessee are going to have their voice heard in the Tennessee House during the special session.”
Other Democrats remained hopeful.
Sen. Jeff Yarbro, of Nashville, said Republican fiscal conservatives in the Senate could provide a check on the governor’s initiative, which he called “a new entitlement program” for wealthy families.
“This is going to be one of the biggest commitments of financial resources that Tennessee makes for the next generation,” Yarbro said. “It will limit what options we have, what investments we make across the board. And at its core, it is a giveaway to existing private school families.”
Voucher supporters make a big advertising push
While a recent Vanderbilt University poll indicates that Tennesseans are split on vouchers, the governor has maintained that most Tennesseans support his Education Freedom Act.
“It’s time for parents — not the government — to decide where their child goes to school and what they learn,” Lee tweeted Monday.
Lee and other voucher supporters have flooded the airwaves this month with TV and radio ads and social media messages to promote “school choice” through campaigns paid for by out-of-state pro-voucher groups such as the American Federation for Children and Americans for Prosperity.
He also has touted a letter of support for vouchers from seven mayors in northeast Tennessee, where Hurricane Helene caused hundreds of millions of dollars of flood damage last fall. The mayors said they were encouraged that Lee proposes to reimburse public school systems for any funding lost if students leave their public schools to use a private school voucher.
“This measure provides local districts with the stability needed to adjust to changes in enrollment without compromising the quality of education for students,” the mayors wrote.
And the president of the Club for Growth, another national pro-voucher group with deep pockets, warned Republican lawmakers that they could face the same fate as legislative incumbents in Texas and Tennessee who lost their primary races against well-funded opponents after resisting voucher proposals.
Voucher opponents have held rallies across the state in recent weeks to mobilize Tennesseans to contact their elected representatives in the legislature.
And ahead of the session, the chairman of a group representing Tennessee’s top business executives urged the legislature to make major changes to the bill.
David Pickler, a Memphis-area businessman who chairs the Tennessee Business Roundtable, said any statewide voucher bill should limit eligibility to students from lower-income families, require all recipients to take annual state tests to gauge their academic progress, and create open enrollment across all public school systems.
In an open letter, Picker said vouchers can’t deliver choice to families who can’t navigate the application process, who can’t afford private-school tuition even with a $7,075 voucher, or who depend on schools for food and other basic needs.
“For the hundreds of thousands of Tennessee K-12 students in those situations, their public school is their only real option,” he wrote.
Pickler also noted that most Tennessee jobs are filled by public school graduates, while private schools don’t teach career and technical education skills that many employers rely on.
Among the business group’s members is Lee Co., the family-owned HVAC business that the governor ran before he took office in 2019.
Students call for action against gun violence
Outside the Capitol on Monday, students said they were tired of gun violence in their schools and neighborhoods and chanted “Enough is enough!” “Save our kids!” and “Not one more!”
“I am 19 years old, I am a college student, and I am pissed off,” Jermaine Cole Jr. told the crowd. “We have to take time out of our day to come to this Capitol to meet with adults who are acting like children.”
State Rep. Jason Powell, a Nashville Democrat, wrote Lee to ask that the special session include action on school safety, gun violence, and hate crimes. The governor did not respond, Powell said later.
“I am so angry, sad, emotional, disappointed that yet again, we are here to talk about another school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee,” Powell told the rally. “We continue to take no action when it comes to school shooting, gun violence, or now the hate that led to this.”
The 17-year-old student who shot and killed a 16-year-old student in the cafeteria of Antioch High School, before killing himself, was active on social networks that glorify mass shootings and trade hateful memes.
Sage Bowman, a sophomore at Nashville’s Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School, was among the throng of students who showed up at the Capitol. She hoped the showing will make lawmakers eventually revisit the state’s lax gun laws.
“Every day I go to school, I’m scared,” said the 16-year-old. “I just don’t want to be scared any more.”
Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.
