Note: Senate Bill 620 never ran in committee. Instead, Johnson tried to run another scholarship bill, Senate Bill 539, that failed in the House Education Committee April 4. 

By Steve Brawner, © 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This is the part of the legislative session when you might expect Gov. Asa Hutchinson to set it on cruise control. Instead, he made a right turn last week and stepped on the gas.

I write that first sentence because he’s accomplished three of his four priorities: a tax cut, increased highway funding, and higher teacher pay. All that’s left is shrinking the number of state agencies from 42 to 15. That government transformation is slowly working its way through the Legislature – as one would expect with a 2,000-page bill.

Still to come is the Revenue Stabilization Act process, where lawmakers will determine exactly how tax dollars will be spent. There might be a big fight over the Arkansas Works health program, but probably not. Then everyone can go home.

Hutchinson has accomplished a lot and still has a lot to do, which is one reason his strong support of Senate Bill 620 by Sen. Blake Johnson, R-Corning, and Rep. Ken Bragg, R-Sheridan, is interesting.

The bill would create the Capitol Promise Scholarship. It would provide $3.5 million annually from the governor’s discretionary fund for about 500 lower-income K-12 students in Pulaski County to attend private schools. When they graduate, they’ll be eligible for $5,000 scholarships to attend one of the colleges in Pulaski County.

The bill specifies that any district under state control – that would be the Little Rock School District – would not lose state funding by losing students. The county’s three other districts would, and so would Little Rock if the state sets it free.

The program starts in 2020-21 and would continue for five years so the results could be studied. A future governor and future lawmakers would decide whether to continue it. If they don’t, I guess the K-12 students could lose their private school funding and … return to their old schools?

The governor announced his support for the bill – in fact, announced its existence – on March 20, two months into the session with about a month remaining. So it came late and suddenly.

It’s really a voucher program, and vouchers are controversial.

Supporters say they give poorer families, especially those whose kids attend bad schools, the same choice wealthier families have, which is to find a better fit for their children. It’s hard to fix every bad school, but we can rescue some students, and losing those students might light a fire under the failing schools, as competition sometimes does. In fact, some supporters believe every family should receive a voucher and educate their children however they deem best.

Opponents say vouchers are a bad way to fix underperforming schools. They take money, students and families away from those schools, diminishing community support and leaving the remaining kids and teachers worse off than before. Instead of offering lifeboats to 500 kids in Pulaski County, the state should patch the ship’s holes or get a better boat.

There are also church-state issues. Should government fund religious schools, and if so, which religions? And if you’re one of those religious schools, do you really want to become reliant on government money?

The politics of this are interesting. It’s a Republican issue that attracts support among some African-Americans, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. But not all Republicans favor vouchers for one or more of the reasons listed above. For much of rural Arkansas where there are no private schools, vouchers aren’t really an option. Those areas are represented by a lot of Republicans. Hutchinson himself had doubts about vouchers in Arkansas until 2017, when he supported a different failed bill.

Public schools and their supporters will strongly oppose this. Meanwhile, legislative Democrats led by Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, held a fiery press conference Monday. Elliott, a former teacher, said voucher supporters have a strategy to get into the “business” of schools. She said this is another experiment on African-Americans in the same tradition as the infamous Tuskegee Study, where penicillin wasn’t given to black men with syphilis.

So no, we’re not going to set it on cruise control for the next three weeks. If you’re in the car, keep your seat belt on.