Gov. Bill Lee visiting Lead Academy in Nashville earlier this month
The school districts in the state’s two most populous counties are promising likely legal action if freshman Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher-like education savings account proposal passes into law.
The school boards for Davidson and Shelby counties, which include Nashville and Memphis, sent word Monday morning that they consider the legislation unconstitutional because “it is arbitrarily limited to only a portion of the state.” Both the Senate and the House passed the bill last week, though their versions differ, in part because the Senate’s only includes Davidson and Shelby counties while the House version also applies in Knox and Hamilton counties.
If the two chambers can come to a compromise on the bill, it would give about $7,300 in public education funds to qualifying families to send their children to private schools, with the state reimbursing some or all of the local school system’s lost revenue for the first three years of participation.
Shelby County Schools and Metro Nashville Public Schools “stand prepared to evaluate and pursue all legal remedies,” according to the joint release.
“We owe it to this generation of students — and to all of those who follow them — to fight for a system that is fairly funded,” MNPS Interim Director Adrienne Battle said in the release.
Every lawmaker in Davidson County voted against the bill, as did most in Shelby County.
The promised legal action from Davidson and Shelby counties might not be the only court challenge looming. Critics of the bill, and even some Senate Republicans who voted for it, have questioned whether it is constitutional to exclude students of undocumented immigrants from participating, given that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states must educate students regardless of immigration status.
But if a negotiated compromise on the bill includes language that would include the children of undocumented immigrants as an effort to stave off such a legal challenge, the bill could lose support from immigration-focused Republicans in the House. With an already-razor-thin margin of support in the House, any further defections could spell doom, or at least further wrangling, for what House Speaker Glen Casada called Lee’s “most important” first-year policy push.
Lee has said multiple times, including last week, that he wants the ESAs to be reserved for the children of citizens and legal residents.
