State Agency Being Blamed For Rules That Reflect The Plain Reading Of The Law.
From the AP’s Jeff Amy:
ATLANTA (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of students in Georgia will be eligible for $6,500 vouchers to pay for private school tuition or home-schooling expenses — far more than many legislators expected — under an expansive interpretation of the law by the new agency running the program.
Students who attend the lowest performing 25% of schools under Georgia’s academic rating system are supposed to be eligible to apply.
But the Georgia Education Savings Authority, a body created by the law, wrote rules saying any student in such a school’s attendance zone is eligible, even if they don’t attend that school. For example, if a middle school is on the list, elementary and high school students who live in that zone can also apply.
Emphasis mine.
GESA did not expand anything, they read the plain language contained in SB 233, the Promise Scholarship Act which describes the conditions by which a student is eligible for the program in lines 342-371. Included in that list are lines 354 and 355 which clearly say a student is eligible if:
The student resides in the attendance zone of a public school that is included on the list of public schools provided for in Code Section 20-2B-29;
As Jeff Amy wrote in his article, a student could attend an elementary or high school that is not in the bottom 25% list but be zoned for a middle school that is and be eligible for a Promise Scholarship, assuming they meet all the other eligibility requirements. This makes sense, especially when you realize that the 25% cutoff is arbitrary and that if a middle school is on the list, the elementary or high school in the same area is likely close to the bottom 25% as well.
Thus, the idea that the GESA rule on this point is an overly broad interpretation of the law simply isn’t the case.
Let’s cut to the chase. The requirement that only students zoned for the worst 25% performing schools are eligible was a compromise necessary to get the bill passed out of the Senate. The House made changes to the bill to limit eligibility even further by placing a funding cap on the overall program. If the Legislature chooses to fully fund the Promise Scholarship program during the 2025 session, less than 22,000 students will be allowed to enroll…out of over 1,700,000 K-12 students in Georgia. This is a tiny program!
The SB 233 compromise is excessively complex and difficult to implement as the folks at GESA are experiencing. No other state in the country runs an education scholarship program this way. If the Legislature wants to further complicate and limit this already complicated and limited program, they can certainly do that, but don’t get mad at GESA for setting out to do what y’all told them to do.
I’ve never made it a secret that I wanted SB 233 as it was originally proposed, which said every K-12 student should be eligible. I’ve also never kept it secret that once the Promise Scholarship program is up and running, I’ll be back asking for more. Are kids zoned for a bottom 26% school much better off than a bottom 25% school? What about a bottom 30%, 35% etc…? Shouldn’t we want every student in Georgia to have access to a high-quality education? Access to options is a key part of improving the quality of our K-12 system as a whole.
SB 233 was a good down payment for what we needed to do in Georgia. I’ll most definitely be there to oppose any effort to further limit the program we worked so hard to create.
