Thread by @VoteGloriaJ

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨This week's action alert is a bill on vouchers!

We need your help again this week on a new education bill. This time it is addressing vouchers. Please contact members to oppose bill HB2861 on Tuesday in the House K12 Subcommittee.

When the TN Legislature passed the education savings account voucher bill in 2019 it applied to only Nashville and Memphis schools. The courts have declared this is unconstitutional because state laws must apply statewide.

This bill is an attempt to make the program constitutional by expanding the voucher program statewide by expanding eligibility to students attending schools assigned to the Achievement Schools District (ASD) by Commissioner Schwinn.

If you think the ASD is just a threat for big cities remember that there are 166 schools, some in smaller counties like Anderson, Bedford, Campbell, Cumberland, Fayette, Hardeman, Madison and Maury that have recently had schools in the bottom 10% of student performance.

These schools could be just one bad testing cycle away from being taken over by the ASD and eligible for vouchers. Your public school tax dollars would be diverted to private schools.

This is the camel's nose under the tent to get the statewide voucher program Lee and the supermajority have been angling for!

Another way this bill opens the flood gate is making the voucher available to any student "zoned to attend a school in an LEA that, during the three-year period immediately preceding September 1, 2025, or thereafter,

did not offer students one-hundred eighty (180) days of in-person learning for a school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic."

This provision is clearly aimed at districts that held remote rather than in-person school--Shelby and Davidson County, again--but also appears to include any district that even had a week of mask mandates.

I wonder if any district held in-person school for the entire pandemic. It isn't clear exactly which districts would or would not be affected by this provision.

Please email these subcommittee members and ask them to vote no on HB2861:
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Please email these sponsors of the legislation and ask them to withdraw their support of this statewide voucher bill:
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