Mississippi: Senate passes special-needs voucher bill

The Clarion-Ledger
By: Emily Le Coz
February 11, 2015

A measure aimed at helping K-12 student with special needs passed the Senate on Wednesday with its main sponsor citing Mississippi’s woeful history of failing children with disabilities.

The Equal Opportunity for Students with Special Needs Act passed the floor 27-21.

“This injustice cannot continue,” said state Sen. Nancy Collins, R-Tupelo, holding up a 1997 Clarion-Ledger newspaper citing dismal special-education statistics and saying little has changed in the nearly two decades since.

About 18 percent of students with disabilities graduated from high school then; about 23 percent graduate now.

Collins’s measure, Senate Bill 2695, gives $7,000 to parents of special-needs students who want to seek educational services outside the public school district. It’s limited the first year to 500 students who meet the bill’s criteria.

Parents would get the money on pre-paid debit cards, which they could use toward private school tuition, tutoring, books, therapy and other educational needs through vendors approved by the Mississippi Department of Education.

It would cost $3.5 million the first year, with money coming from the state general fund and not the Mississippi Adequate Education Program earmarked for public schools.

Collins said more than a dozen states already have such programs and in one of them – Florida – only about six percent of all eligible students have opted in.

The bill survived an attempt by state Sen. Bill Stone, D-Holly Springs, to strip its language and substitute it for his own measure modeled after a failed proposal backed by The Parents’ Campaign.

The Parents Campaign opposes SB 2695 because it helps only a fraction of the tens of thousands of students with disabilities and because it’s seen as a step toward privatization of public schools.

State Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, made similar arguments on the Senate floor. He said the program diverts funds from public education to benefit a few students without solving the real problem of poor special education services.

But Collins said the state has known about its special education inadequacies for decades. Its only solution, she said, has been to form study committees and task forces and committees whose recommendations it never listens to anyway.

This bill, she said, at least offers one tangible solution to students who otherwise settle for a subpar education.

Gov. Phil Bryant lauded passage of SB 2695, as did the National Excellence in Education Foundation.

“Rather than fighting parents in costly legal battles, opponents of this needed legislation should rally behind these parents and give them the funding their children deserve,” said foundation spokeswoman Mary Laura Bragg in a statement.

SB 2695 now goes to the House for consideration. A similar bill introduced by state Rep. Carolyn Crawford, R-Pass Christian, also awaits passage in the House.