Governor Greg Abbott announced a special session on Thursday, calling Texas lawmakers back to the Capitol next week. The third special session of the year will center on passing private school vouchers – a measure that failed to become law during the regular legislative session.
However, Abbott’s call notably excluded funding for public schools tacked on to a school finance package proposed by Senate Republicans in a last-minute effort to try to get vouchers to pass in the earlier session.
“There is no wiggle room in what the governor put out today to ensure that we might get a clean school funding bill,” Nicole Hill, communications director for the Texas branch of the American Federation of Teachers, said. “We assumed – and I think a lot of people assumed – that the actual agenda for the special session would include other unfinished business in terms of our schools. It does not. It is a very narrowly tailored special session agenda that is specifically all about vouchers.”
Additional state funding would allow teachers to receive pay raises, special education programs to get more money and school districts operating on budget deficits to stay afloat.
According to Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, Texas underfunds public schools, spending more than $4,000 less per student than the national average.
While Texas public school teachers earn more than $7,700 less than their national counterparts, he said.
The legislation Abbott is requesting will likely not garner much support in the House, particularly among Democrats and a handful of rural Republicans – who opposed vouchers during the regular session.
Robison said this small coalition of Republicans is against the measure because removing already limited state dollars from their local school districts could force district closures.
“School districts are the center of these communities. They’re closer to their schools in these rural areas because their public schools are often their biggest employers,” he said. “They (rural Republicans) know it’s wrong to take money from those public schools and send them to private schools in Houston or Dallas.”
The special session will also focus on immigration, including two proposals initially introduced in the spring that would allow state police to remove immigrants from the United States who lack proper documentation and establish a state criminal charge for those who enter the country illegally.
This legislation aims to increase state authority over patrolling the border, largely challenging the federal government’s restrictions on a state’s ability to enact immigration policies.
Abbott addressed another immigration-adjacent topic in the call, asking lawmakers to create legislation that targets public safety, security, environmental quality and property ownership in places such as the Colony Ridge Development.
This development has been at the center of Republicans’ attention after unconfirmed conservative media reports claimed the Liberty County residential area is run by cartel personnel and caters to housing undocumented immigrants.
The final request Abbott included in his call was for legislation that would restrict private employers from having the ability to impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates. A similar proposal, which passed during the regular session, banned public employers from doing so.
Abbott has made it known that passing legislation to provide families with state dollars that would allow them to send their children to private school is his top priority.
Although the governor’s call does not indicate any flexibility on including the additional funding for public schools, Hill said public school advocates expect a “repeat” of the last regular session.
“The way the governor has worded this does invite the same playbook of trying to use public school funding as carrots, to entice legislators who are holdouts on vouchers to get them to bite to get them to compromise,” Hill said. “But for us, and I think for most people in the public education space, there is no deal we’re willing to accept.”
Abbott has said he is prepared to call as many special sessions as needed to get the measure to pass. The third special session will start on Monday, October 9, and the Texas Senate Education Committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
