Mississippi House Speaker Rep. Jason White, R-West, speaks about the bipartisan support in the passing of a state incentives package for a Mississippi factory that will manufacture batteries for electric vehicles — a project that promises 2,000 jobs, during a special session of the Mississippi Legislature, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
- Speaker Jason White says there’s no need to send a “milquetoast, very lame Senate Education agenda” back to the House after the Senate “wholeheartedly rejected” the House’s education freedom measures.
House Speaker Jason White (R) says efforts in the Mississippi Senate to revive education-related legislation that previously died is “not even worthy of a discussion.”
Earlier this week, Senate Education Committee chairman Dennis DeBar (R) moved to suspend the rules in the chamber to amend a House bill originally aimed at clarifying provisions in the Mississippi Student Funding Formula.
Yet, when the dust settled, senators had added language to require school districts to adopt a policy to restrict student cell phone use, allow retired administrators to come back and teach while also drawing from state retirement, establish financial literacy coursework, allow school boards to receive state health insurance, and more.
All of these Senate-backed measures previously died in the House.
Notably, legislation aimed at expanding education freedom for families and students in Mississippi that died in the Senate, such as public-to-public school transfers and the ‘Tim Tebow Act,’ were not among the revived measures in the Republican-majority chamber.
READ MORE: Senate revives education-related legislation to ban cell phones in classrooms, provide additional CTE funding, and more
Senator DeBar told his Senate colleagues that in talking with the House Education Chairman, Rob Roberson (R), “there may be some appetite to revive these bills.”
However, late Thursday evening following a Magnolia Tribune report on the Senate actions, Speaker White all but said they were dead on arrival in his chamber.
“No need to send a milquetoast, very lame Senate Education agenda back to the House, it’s not even worthy of discussion and no real need to report on it Magnolia Tribune,” White wrote on X.
White continued, “We showed the Senate what Mississippi’s education future looks like with the House bills, and they wholeheartedly rejected them without so much as a whisper.”
This session, the House put forward an education agenda aimed at expanding education freedom and school choice for families and students. House measures sought to expand charter schools into C-rated districts, allow children of taxpaying homeschool families the ability to participate in public school extracurricular activities like over 30 other states have done, and revise language to allow easier public-to-public school transfers, among other measures. All were viewed as core conservative policies not only backed by Republican votes in Mississippi but as Speaker White has noted previously, President Donald Trump and the GOP platform.
White laid the blame for the disconnect in education policy between the two chambers on Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann (R) and anti-education freedom lobbyists.
“Mississippians are beginning to take notice of the Lt. Governor and his Senate leaders doing the bidding of the status quo,” White added in his X post Thursday night. “Somebody will have to answer for it sooner or later.”
White then included the hastages “#letmecheckwithnancy #statusquo,” a reference to The Parents Campaign’s executive director Nancy Loome, a vocal opponent of education freedom and school choice. The lobbying group has actively worked to help kill the House Republican policies this session, just as it has done in prior years.
