Tennessee State Representative Scott Cepicky (R-Culleoka), who chairs the Education Instruction Subcommittee, said Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill, known as the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, will likely be revealed next week.
Cepicky said there was a meeting on Wednesday for the committee chairs and caucus members to go over the bill’s language, making tweaks to ensure the bill will “function properly” and is “constitutional.”
“I think we’re in the final pros right now of people tweaking language…First of all, it’s got to function properly. Number two, it’s got to be constitutional, what we’re trying to do, and then number three, we need everybody to agree that this is what we’re doing and then stop adding things and moving things around,” Cepicky said on Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy. “We’re about there. All the chairman of education along with the speaker’s office have been working on this to get this in a final position so that we can hopefully present this because I believe the bill is going to be put on notice for next week.”
“We’re hoping everybody agrees on the language we have and then we can move forward with the bill, and all the chairmen know that here’s what’s in the bill, here’s the language, and here’s how this bill applies to our committee,” Cepicky added.
In regards to what committees the bill will have to pass through, Cepicky predicted the bill would be debated by the K-12 Subcommittee, Education Administration Committee, Education Instruction Committee, Government Operations Committee, Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee, Finance, Ways, and Means Committee, and Calendar & Rules Committee.
When pressed on the timeframe between the time the bill is on notice and when the House and Senate vote on it, Cepicky said he expects the process to last about seven weeks.
“The goal with that is to make sure everybody has enough time to study it and make sure that the language, when it’s passed, makes Tennessee a better place for education,” Cepicky said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
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