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Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal to create a statewide school voucher program easily cleared its first Senate hurdle but took a split vote and five-plus hours of often contentious debate to pass out of a House committee.
The legislation — the most ambitious education plan of Lee’s five-plus years in office — passed 7-1 out of the Senate Education Committee on Wednesday, with the panel’s lone Democrat casting the dissenting vote.
In the House Education Administration Committee, the measure advanced 12-7, including four Republicans voting against it in the GOP-controlled legislature. Passage came even as Maryville City Schools Director Mike Winstead, a 2018 finalist for National Superintendent of the Year, called vouchers “a bitter pill, maybe some would say a poison pill” that he believes will destabilize K-12 education across Tennessee in the long run.
“You can coat that with a lot of good things and make it go down a little easier,” Winstead testified before the panel. “But in the end, we’re being asked to ingest a poison pill.”