“I’ve tried to draft a bill that protects the state, gives kids choices and protects public schools,” Nelson said last week. “People say this will take money away from public schools. The way I’m looking at it, the sole function of education is not to fund an institution, it’s to educate students.”

HB 2949 would allow current private school students and those eligible for public pre-kindergarten and kindergarten after the law’s effective date — likely to be after the start of the next school year — to receive an amount equal to up to 90 percent of what the home public school would have received for that student.

Five percent would go to the Department of Education and the state treasurer for administrative costs, and the remainder would be redistributed to public schools through the state funding formula.

Opponents of the proposal say it would siphon off already scarce financial resources, often to the parents of students who would have attended private school anyway. This is important, because those students are not counted for the purposes of allocating state money.