Democrats are looking to the Senate and a rogue set of lawmakers to help them defeat an education bill they think is a giveaway to the charter school industry at the expense of public schools.
The bill would give parents more power in changing failing schools, giving them the ability to help dictate a “turnaround” option if the one the district originally prescribed for the school doesn’t work after a year.
Supporters say it gives parents a greater stake in the process, but opponents argue it would open the door to turning over public schools – and by extension public tax dollars – to for-profit charter school companies.
The bill (HB 1191, SB 1718) has already cleared the House but has been blocked so far in the Senate.
Last week, a bi-partisan coalition of senators stopped the proposal from being fast-tracked to the chamber floor, voting against a proposal to pull it from committee and bring it straight to the floor. So leadership one-upped them, and scheduled a rare extra meeting of the Senate Budget Committee – on a Saturday morning – to vote it out to get it to the floor.
This week, opponents have tried to round up the votes to keep the bill from passing now that it is available for a floor vote.
The measure caused a rare moment of intense drama in a calendar meeting this week. Usually when voting on a list of bills to take up on the floor, the committee votes for an entire set of measures. Opponents of the school bill, however, were hoping to vote against taking it up, and asked to separate it from the rest of the list of bills. The chairman and his allies, backers of the bill, refused, and it’s now ready for a floor vote – if backers can get the votes.
“We had 19 senators that objected to removing the bill from committee,” said Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston. “That’s 12 Democrats and 7 Republicans. That’s a pretty strong bi-partisan coalition.”
But it’s one short of what they’d need to kill the bill.
“We’re going to find that person,” Rich said.
