JACKSON, Miss.—Hopes for legislative action on banning cellphones in classrooms, providing health insurance for school board members and increasing funding for gifted students appear dead in the Mississippi House. The Mississippi House Education Committee has met for the last time this session, Chairman Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, told members during a five-minute Wednesday meeting in which they approved two Senate education bills.
“This is our only meeting that we will be having, from what I am understanding, just to give y’all a heads up on that,” he said at the end of the Wednesday convening.
If the House Education Committee indeed does not host any additional meetings, all of the Senate’s education bills except Senate Bill 2294 (requiring computer science or technical education classes) and Senate Bill 2103 (exchanging federal ethics requirements for school counselors with state policies) will die in committee without being taken up for a vote.
During a Stennis Institute press forum on Monday, House Speaker Jason White, R-West, said it is within the realm of possibility that Gov. Tate Reeves could call a special session for education legislation.
“The governor’s made no bones about his support for this, so I think a special session either in session or out of session is certainly not off the table. And it would, you know, finally, maybe drive this conversation a little bit more,” White said on Monday at Hal and Mal’s in Jackson, Mississippi.
Earlier this month, the House narrowly passed a massive education bill that included a private-school voucher program championed by both White and Reeves. The Senate Education Committee killed House Bill 2 without any discussion during a minute-long meeting on Feb. 3. Following the vote, Reeves was publicly critical of the committee chairman, Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann.
‘This Is Our Only Education Meeting’
During Wednesday’s meeting, Rep. Kevin Felsher, R-Biloxi, asked if he heard Roberson correctly.
“You said, if I heard you right, this will be our only education meeting,” he said to the chairman.
“This is our only education meeting,” Roberson clarified. “So, these two bills are what we are bringing out. Hopefully, we’re able to work with the Senate and get things moving in a good direction.”
The Mississippi Free Press was unable to attend the meeting and obtained an audio recording from Mississippi Today Education Reporter Devna Bose. The Mississippi Free Press asked the chairman on Thursday if it was his decision not to host any other meetings during this legislative session. Roberson said yes, he made the choice, but that he could not “say too much right now because I’m in the middle of these issues.”
“Right now, it’s just that this is where we are in the process. That’s all I can say right now,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Thursday. “We’re in the middle of negotiating back and forth, and right now, I don’t know that we’re going to move forward with anything. But things up here are always subject to change.”
When asked, Mississippi House Speaker Rep. Jason White, R-West, told the Mississippi Free Press on Thursday that he is “involved in all the decisions” the chamber makes. He said he did not have a reason for why it would be the last meeting, other than saying Roberson and his committee “have considered (the bills) they want to consider.”
“He found the bills he wanted to take up, and he took them up,” White said of Roberson.
The Mississippi Free Press attempted to interview Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann in his office at the Mississippi Capitol Building on Thursday, but Communications Director Hannah Milliet said he did “not have any availability this afternoon.”
House Education Committee Passes Two Senate Bills
Senate Bill 2103 would remove the requirement for school counselors to abide by the national code of ethics. Instead, MDE would have control over ethics policies for counselors.
The House Education Committee passed the legislation with a strike-all amendment to specify that it would require the Mississippi Department of Education to integrate a “model code of professional ethics” for school counselors into its policies for local school boards to adopt, Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, told the committee.
He added a reverse repealer amendment, which means the Legislature would have to review the bill again in the following years if it becomes law.
“I had a couple people ask this question, so I just wanted to be clear and … set this out here,” Roberson told the committee. “We are not taking ethics out of counseling—that is not what we’re doing. The intent here is to give a little bit better, clearer path for that.”
The committee passed Senate Bill 2294—which added requirements for high-school students to complete a computer science or career and technical education course before they graduate—with a strike-all amendment that took away that part of the bill and added initiatives for math, reading and financial literacy. Roberson said he made this decision because House Bill 1035 has a similar provision to the Senate’s original version of S.B. 2294.
“What this would do is, we’re going to put in its place our math initiative that MDE actually wrote,” Roberson said. “They have their own plans for this, they changed some things. The House’s position is that we like what MDE wrote. The reading initiative is how MDE plugged in and the financial literacy part. Everything else has been stripped out of this bill.”
The math section is called the Mississippi Math Act, which would expand math coaching and add math screenings for kindergarten up to fifth grade. The Adolescent Literacy Initiative would expand the 2013 Literacy Based Promotion Act to include students through the eighth grade to have literacy screenings, high-quality instructional materials, literacy intervention and a multi-tiered system of support. Sixth- through eighth-graders would be required to take financial literacy courses, and high-school students must take a financial literacy or personal finance course at least once before graduation.