Tennessee State Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) said he is “much happier” with the Senate’s version of Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill compared to the House’s version, which includes additional incentives not particularly related to school choice.
Pody said the Senate’s version is a “much more stripped down version” of Lee’s bill, explaining how each $7,000 voucher would “follow” qualifying students, granting them the “right to have the choice of where they want to go.”
“The money is going to follow that student. Now, the student or the parents don’t get the money directly, but it will be in a situation where they would be able to say, ‘Hey, we want to go to this private school, we want to go to a homeschool co-op’ or can even go to another public school in a different county and the money would actually follow them,” Pody said on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“Now the House side has much different language and their language is going to include a lot of things,” Pody added, noting how the language also addresses other issues in regards to education.
Pody agreed when Leahy said the House version seems to be “incentivizing separate legislators to come on board” with the idea of school vouchers.
“I would characterize that correctly because if they’re feeling if they can give enough to public education, that maybe it’ll help some of the educators to come on board with this, or they won’t be as adamantly opposed,” Pody explained. “They’re also saying maybe they can relax some testing issues, or they can relax other things that are perhaps things that the educators have been talking about for a long time. If they can do that, maybe they won’t be as opposed to this bill.”
“I’m not for that,” Pody added. “I would rather have the bill vote up or down based on what it is and not by all the side deals that, ‘Hey boy, if we can give you this, maybe you’ll be okay with it.’ So I’m much happier with the Senate side of this bill rather than what the house is looking for.”
Noting how he’s “confident” that the Senate’s version of the bill will pass, Pody said he’s “not sure” how close the margin of the bill passing in the House will be, due to the added incentives.
Meanwhile, Pody said the Senate bill’s next destination is the Finance Committee, as the legislation carries a $144 million fiscal note.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Mark Pody” by Mark Pody.
