Statehouse Express: Season 4, Episode 1
We’re back! Welcome aboard the 2023 version of the Statehouse Express! The 2023 General Assembly convened on January 9th @ 1:30pm. As you may know, 2023 is a budget session which means it is a long session where it scheduled to conclude no later than April 29th. Being a budget session, it also means it will be an extremely important session dealing with any legislation that has a fiscal or a cost. Like…school choice!
Bills are still being posted at the time of this writing, but all bills had to be submitted by January 12th. INPEA currently has 32 bills on our tracking list. Not surprisingly, three big areas of emphasis are mental health, K-12 education and public health. K-12 education is typically over 50% of the total budget. There are only a few bills of interest posted to date, but we anticipate more bills to come before the deadline. The vast majority of bills introduced will not get a hearing, but vetting all bills for any potential benefit or harm is important at the beginning of any session.
INPEA has been meeting with key legislative leadership. INPEA priorities going into this session are, as always, to protect and defend our previous choice successes and our faith-based schools’ religious liberties. We also are hopeful of further choice expansions. Doing away with voucher eligibility tracks (or hoops as I like to call them), ensuring kindergarten eligibility, and if possible, further expanding or eliminating income eligibility. Early signs are that there is significant traction to accomplish some if not all of our priorities. We also have some technical fixes that we are working on, like fixing the fees language and the birthdate eligibility. Outside of the choice arena, we also hope to work on legislation that would promote improving the teacher pipeline and increasing school safety funding.
On Tuesday night, I was invited to attend the Governor’s State of the State Address where he laid out his legislative and budget priorities. Although he never specifically mentioned school choice, he did ask for an additional 1.1 billion in K-12 funding. This would increase the per pupil state tuition support amount which would then impact the 90% voucher amount for our choice schools.
Education Committees will begin meeting next week. They haven’t released what bills will be heard as of yet. Bills are just being assigned to the various committees. It is not totally clear at this point whether our choice agenda items will be addressed in separate bills or through the budget. Time will tell.
We have high hopes for this session; but it will take all of our non-public school stakeholders to engage if we are to be successful! And that means you! All of you!
We need everyone to be ready to reach out to their elected representatives at critical times during the session. So please watch for our legislative alerts! We also have quite a few new legislators so they will need to be educated about the importance of both non-public schools and our choice programs that support our students. If have questions or need ideas on how you can help, reach out to Andrea or me.
This could be another historic session, but it will take all of us to get it to the finish line. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you again next week for the next episode of the Statehouse Express!