The Alabama Senate has passed a bill that would expand the Alabama Accountability Act, a 10-year-old law that allows parents to use scholarships funded by tax credits to send their children to private schools. .
The vote came after a four-and-a-half hour filibuster that ended when the Senate approved a petition for cloture, or to end the debate. Democratic and Republican senators took part in the filibuster.
The Senate passed the bill on a 26-7 vote. No Republicans voted against the bill and no Democrats voted for it. It moves to the House of Representatives.
The bill, SB263 by Sen. Donnie Chesteen, R-Geneva, would make Accountability Act scholarships available to more students by raising the income level for eligibility. The scholarships are funded by donations to scholarship granting organizations. Donors receive a credit on their state income tax.
The expansion in eligibility also apply to all students with individual education plans, including those with intellectual disabilities and speech, language, vision, hearing, and physical impairments, as well as learning disabilities. The bill would expand eligible spending of scholarship funds beyond tuition and fees to include transportation, uniforms, services for a child’s unique needs, and tutoring. The bill would raise the maximum scholarship to $10,000 per student.
“I think it’s very important for students with unique needs to be able to use these scholarships for tutoring or for special services,” Chesteen said.
The bill would require students using scholarships to take the state’s annual standardized test in math and reading.
Chesteen’s bill would boost the annual cap on total tax credits that fund the scholarships from $30 million to $40 million. It would allow the cap to rise to as much as $60 million over time.
Eligible students can use Accountability Act scholarships to attend one of 157 participating private schools or to pay tuition to a public school other than the school the child is zoned to attend. Around 2,700 students currently use scholarships to attend private schools, most of which are religious schools.
Chesteen said the eligibility changes in his bills are expected to increase the number of students receiving scholarships by about 1,000 to 1,200.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Chesteen said. “This is just one bill. But it will provide an opportunity for more students to take advantage of the scholarships. And that’s what I’m proud of tonight.”
The Accountability Act scholarship program has awarded 25,900 scholarships since it was established in 2013, paying about $147.4 million in tuition, mostly to private schools, including religious schools.
The Accountability Act sparked sharp disagreements and litigation when it passed a decade ago, with Republicans saying it was a way to help students who were stuck in underperforming public schools and whose parents could not otherwise afford private school. Democrats and other opponents of the bill said it would hurt education because the tax credits reduce funding to the Education Trust Fund, which supports public schools. Tonight’s vote on the SB263 shows those positions have not changed.
“I just don’t think that this is a solution,” Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, said. “It may work in some places. It may work for some families. But for the least of these, is it working? This is not for the least of these. This is for the middle to the top.”
Singleton said the right approach is to provide struggling public schools more resources to improve, rather than provide a way for students to go elsewhere.
“What you’re doing is leaving children behind,” Singleton said. “Children that I care about.”
Sen. Larry Stutts, R-Sheffield, participated in the filibuster to draw attention to his bill, the Parental Rights in Children’s Education Act, (PRICE Act) which would provide parents with $6,900 per student in education savings accounts they could use to pay for private school, home school, and other education expenses. Stutts’ bill has won approval in a Senate committee but has not come to the floor for a vote. Stutts said he considered the PRICE Act an essential part of a “three-legged stool” to provide school choice, along with the Accountability Act and charter schools. He asked Chesteen to set his bill aside for the night and bring it back as a package with the PRICE Act, but Chesteen did not support that idea.
After his bill passed, Chesteen said he did not disagree with Stutts’ point that more school choice options are needed.
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“I think this is one leg as Senator Stutts talked about,” Chesteen said. “I think there are other components, other school choice bills that will be coming. This was the bill that I happened to be working on.”
“I do think there are other opportunities for expanding school choice,” Chesteen said.
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