WEEK IN REVIEW
GOVERNOR PREPARES TO SIGN SCHOOL CHOICE INTO LAW
(AUSTIN) — Texas’ first universal school choice legislation is just a signature away from becoming law after the Senate concurred in House amendments to SB 2 Thursday. Abbott said last week he will sign the bill, creating a system that would use a billion dollars in state dollars to fund about 100,000 education savings accounts that parents can use to pay for private school expenses. Rather than request a conference committee to hammer out the differences between the House and Senate version, bill author and Education K-16 Committee chair Senator Brandon Creighton of Conroe asked the Senate to agree with House amendments, which he said strengthened rather than diluted the bill and will implement a program he believes will help thousands of students whose needs aren’t being met in public school. “It’s about putting kids at the center of Texas education policy,” said Creighton. “SB 2 empowers families by giving them the freedom to simply make choices.”
The amount allocated to each ESA will be about the same, though arrived at through different means. The Senate put a flat $10,000 into each account, the House ties it to 85 percent of the estimated per-student funding in a given year, which amounts to a little more than the Senate plan this year and allows the amount to follow future changes in education funding. It accounts for funding weights, letting students with disabilities qualify for the full amount they would’ve received in a public school, up to $30,000. It also changes the prioritization system if applications exceed space, giving disabled and poorer students priority. No more than 20 percent of the slots can go to students with family incomes exceeding 500 percent of the federal poverty level, about $150,000 for a family of four.
Opponents to the measure raised concerns about sending money outside the public school system, arguing that money would better be spent to improve public education. “The answer isn’t to give 100,000 children a lottery ticket to go to a private school or somewhere else and leave the other 5.3 or 5.4 million children trapped in underperforming schools, the answer is to invest and improve,” said San Antonio Senator José Menéndez. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who’s pushed for choice programs since serving as Senate Education Chair in 2013, told members that the state can have both an expansive school choice program and a robust public education system. “We will always cherish public education and that’s where 95 percent of kids will be, and we want to have the best public education system in the world,” he said.
Also this week, the Senate approved a measure that its author says will zero out school maintenance and operation property taxes for a “super-majority” of senior and disabled homeowners. Earlier in the session, the Senate approved a bill that would raise the homestead exemption – the amount of value a homeowner can write off before property tax assessment – from $100,000 to $140,000 for all homeowners. In that bill, homeowners aged 65 or older or those with disabilities qualified for an additional $10,000. Under the bill passed Wednesday, SB 23 by Houston Senator Paul Bettencourt, that number would go up to $200,000 for those categories of homeowners, raising the total property tax relief passed in the Senate to nearly a $1,000 for the average senor or disabled homeowner. “This bill is going to have probably the single greatest impact on senior property taxpayers and disabled property taxpayers as any bill we’ve ever passed yet in the Texas Senate,” he said during Tuesday’s committee hearing on the bill.
The homestead exemption has been Lt. Governor Patrick’s preferred method of delivering property tax relief since he took office. In that time, the exemption has increased by an order of magnitude. “Just to put this in perspective, in 2015, seniors got about a $25,000 homestead exemption and ten years later they’re getting a $200,000 homestead exemption,” Patrick said.
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