A bill to repeal Tennessee's school voucher program now has bipartisan support

Natalie Allison | The Tennessean

Show Caption Hide Caption House holds tied vote open on school voucher bill The house holds a tied vote open on the school voucher bill.

A bill to repeal Tennessee's controversial school voucher program now has bipartisan support after a Republican lawmaker this week signed on to the Democrat-backed legislation.

Rep. Bruce Griffey, R-Paris, said he became a co-sponsor on Wednesday of a bill filed by Rep. Bo Mitchell, D-Nashville, that would put a stop to the state's education savings account program.

All House Democrats except Rep. John DeBerry of Memphis, who supported ESAs, have signed on to the new legislation.

The House narrowly passed the voucher bill this spring, a vote that prompted former House Speaker Glen Casada to leave the vote board open for 40 minutes while trying to find a member to change positions.

The rollout of the school voucher program has begun amid a swirl of rumors of inquiries by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation into whether improper incentives were offered in exchange for legislators' votes.

In a lengthy statement from Griffey, the freshman Republican listed his reasons for continuing to oppose the voucher legislation, repeatedly referencing a last-minute decision by Rep. Jason Zachary, R-Knoxville, to flip his vote after former House Speaker Glen Casada agreed to have Knox County exempted from the legislation.

“The ESA/School Voucher legislation has been controversial since the moment it was first rolled out last legislative session and has continued to be controversial ever since as new issues continue to surface regarding problems with it," Griffey said, noting that concerns with the bill came from both sides of the aisle.

The bill allows qualifying families in Davidson and Shelby counties to receive $7,300 per child each year to use toward private school tuition or some other costs.

The program is set to begin in fall 2020.

In a seven-point diatribe against the legislation, Griffey said he believed "fraud and abuse will be rampant" in the ESA program, laying out a specific scenario in which a parent purchases "a $1,300 laptop and turns around and sells it for 50 cents on the dollar and pockets $650 cash that could then be spent on drugs or alcohol."

"Question: If a child is being raised by drug addicted parents with substance abuse problems, is giving the parent $7,300 per child really going to improve the child’s education?" Griffey asks in his news release.

He cautioned that the ESA program "is accessible by illegal aliens," though the final version of the bill included language aimed to exclude immigrants in the country illegally from qualifying for ESAs, which are considered a public benefit.

Griffey also warned that voucher funding could hypothetically cover tuition at "Islamic and other religious schools" that "may not emphasize fidelity to our U.S. Constitution."

Griffey and Mitchell said Griffey signed on to the legislation in Mitchell's office Wednesday afternoon.

"His views are views of his own," Mitchell said of Griffey's various reasons for not supporting ESA legislation, but noting that the anti-voucher effort would still need 50 votes to pass.

Mitchell said he has spoken with several other Republican lawmakers who have committed to signing on to the legislation, though he did not say who.

"A lot of Republicans didn’t vote for it the first time," Mitchell said. "When the slush fund doesn’t come through, they’ll vote to repeal it since they didn’t get what they were promised."

Mitchell was referencing a controversial new grant fund that Gov. Bill Lee has since announced would be frozen amid allegations that some lawmakers were guaranteed project funding in their districts in exchange for a voucher vote.

Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.

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