Tennessee State Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald) said he voted present on the State Senate’s version of Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill this week in the education committee because he said he believed there needed to be “more discussion” on the bill before it advanced out of committee.
“I was present, not voting, because I felt like we needed more discussion in the education committee,” Hensley said on Thursday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Hensley (pictured above) said the current Senate version of the bill would allow students to use the voucher money to attend another public school. However, he noted that neither the House nor the governor’s version of the bill would allow that.
“The House bill doesn’t allow people to go to other public schools and the Governor’s bill doesn’t allow that either. I really don’t like that concept. I think it’s going to cause problems down the road,” Hensley explained. “The fiscal note on the senate bill said that 70 percent of the students taking advantage of the voucher would be going to other public schools…People would be using some of the money to pay for them going to another public school and then, it would get very complicated if the student continued to go there.
Hensley said he’s “certainly for school choice,” however, he could not support the current version of the bill allowing for students to attend other public schools through the voucher program.
“I just felt like we needed more discussion in the education committee and so that’s why I passed on the bill, because I wanted more discussion on it. I felt like the policy of the bill should be determined in the education committee, not passed on to a conference committee,” Hensley said. “I’m certainly for school choice, but I really don’t like that point in the Senate bill and that’s the only bill that has that in it. The other bills, the House bill and the Governor’s bill, don’t allow people going to another public school.”
“I just wanted more discussion in the education committee before it left that committee,” Hensley added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Joey Hensley” by Joey Hensley.
