BY STEVE NUZUM
Leading up to the start of each session, South Carolina legislators offer up pre-filed bills.
Some of these bills are serious attempts at creating law and policy; others are political stunts designed to get attention and online clicks, or to satisfy lobbyists and special interest groups, or to offer an opportunity for debate in committees or on the floor of the state House or Senate.
Some of these bills will ultimately become law. Others will be referred to committees to die unceremoniously, without any public comment.
At this point, it’s largely hard to predict which will be which.
As usual, many of the pre-filed bills focus on educational policy, and range from some that seem designed to sincerely address real problems in the education system (such as H. 3210, by Rep. Neal Collins, which limits teacher “other duties as assigned”) to some which seem geared only at adding fuel to the fire of extremist talking points (such as Rep. Josiah Manguson’s H. 3185, which turns the temporary budget proviso used to ban books like Between the World and Me into permanent law).
A “neo-voucher” bill.
The education pre-file which has probably received the most attention so far is S.62 (or its House version, S. 3011), which was debated in an education committee the final days before the General Assembly’s holiday break. This bill establishes “South Carolina Education Trust Funds,” a name which describes a kind of “neo-voucher” for private educational services, to be funded with South Carolina Education Library funds (which are traditionally used to fund higher education scholarships, and can also be used to fund K-12 programs, like school bus repairs).
As members of the committee considering S. 62 themselves acknowledged, the bill potentially faces the same fate as the last voucher bill the South Carolina General Assembly passed, which was firmly shut down by the state Supreme Court for clearly violating the State Constitution.
Legislative priorities for schools.
But whether any individual bill passes or fails, gets a hearing or dies in committee, we can look at the collective set of pre-files and get a sense of some likely issues that will dominate education policy in the coming session (which formally begins on January 14, 2025).
As intellectual freedom coalition ProTruth South Carolina has identified, the initial rounds of pre-filed bills included at least 23 which dealt directly or indirectly with censoring classroom and library instructional materials, limiting diversity training in educational institutions, limiting the rights of transgender students, making it more difficult to teach inclusive history, and/ or promoting school vouchers. Of these, the organization identified only two bills aimed at making teaching more inclusive and accurate.
At least eight of these bills are aimed at either skirting the constitutional prohibition against funding private schools with state funds (by using lottery funds, tax breaks, tax credits, or other supposedly indirect funding methods) or amending the state constitution to explicitly allow the funding of vouchers.
At least three of the pre-filed bills seem to be aimed directly at transgender and nonbinary students, restricting their rights in school and legislating a government-selected definition of gender that formally excludes many of those students. As we know, LGBTQ+ students are already statistically more at risk for self-harm and violence than their non-LGBTQ+ peers, and exclusionary policies make these risks go up substantially.
What has not been prioritized are the major issues facing our state’s education system.
Instead of research-supported school safety efforts, there is a Senate proposal to arm adults within the school building.
Instead of efforts at retaining teachers by improving working conditions or addressing other concerns, there are efforts to lower minimum certification requirements so that expert teachers can be replaced with cheaper alternatives.
Instead of providing resources and useful guidance to deal with the problem of excessive electronic device use in schools, there is a proposal to allow schools to confiscate teachers’ phones.
And instead of a sensible system for helping local districts choose effective books and materials for all students, there is a proposal, by Senator Josh Kimbrell, an outspoken advocate of censoring public libraries, to require many academic courses to incorporate the Christian Bible.
Holding elected officials accountable.
Ultimately, it’s unlikely that most of these efforts will succeed.
In any given year, few education bills pass. The effort with the most steam behind it-- despite South Carolinian’s historical rejection of school vouchers, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of two schemes to use public funds to finance private schools in the last several years-- is the effort to convert state Education Lottery funds into “scholarship accounts” for private education vendors. Despite historic increases in teacher vacancies (offset this year, apparently, only because districts have started to eliminate positions and raise class sizes), new threats to student physical and mental health, and a worsening climate for school staff, these pre-files largely focus on priorities that, at best, do little to help public schools and, at worst, actively undermine and defund them.
And since the election is over and most legislators are now safely in their seats for a few years, it’s up to public education supporters to reach out, to show up, and to remind our elected officials that we’re watching what they do, and that our communities and our children are impacted by their decisions.
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