Parents who have fostered a child at any point during the prior decade would find it easier to obtain one of Georgia’s new $6,500 annual subsidies for private schooling under legislation adopted by state Senate Republicans in a party-line vote Friday.
Senate Bill 152 would eliminate income and other limitations for households that have fostered children and want access to the Georgia Promise Scholarship Act for their own children. The Act became law last year and will begin enrolling families for the next school year starting Saturday, giving them an annual subsidy commonly known as a voucher.
The Act limits participation to families who live in the attendance zone of a public school that the state has deemed to be performing among the bottom quarter of schools statewide. Except for rising kindergartners, children must also have attended their underperforming public school for a year to be eligible. And their household income can’t exceed 400% of the federal poverty line, meaning a family of four must have earned $124,800 or less last year to get the state funding.
SB 152 would exempt foster families from those limitations: they would not have to live in the zone of an underperforming public school, and there would be no income threshold for participation.
However, the exemptions would apply only to the children of parents who fostered a child at any point in the prior decade. Foster children are not addressed by SB 152.
Democrats ardently opposed adoption of the voucher program last year, saying it would benefit the wealthy who can cover the difference in cost between the $6,500 voucher and full tuition, which often exceeds $10,000 a year. Since the funding will come from the same revenue that pays for public schools, the Democrats had also argued that vouchers would cause budget shortfalls. They called the exclusion of foster children in this bill a major shortcoming and questioned why Dolezal and his fellow Republicans didn’t include them.
“The children of the parents can go to the private school,” said Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta. “But we’re telling the foster children ‘no,’ you have to go to the school that I have found to be ineffective for my own kids.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, said there are complicated restrictions in existing law that would have to be worked out so that foster children could participate. He said he would work on new legislation to include them after this legislative session.
Dolezal also pushed back on Democrats who saw potential for abuse of the program. Theoretically, if a parent fostered a child for one day, their children would be entitled to enroll for a scholarship with an SB 152 exemption at any time in the next decade. Once enrolled, they, like any enrolled child, could stay in the program until earning a diploma even if it were to take more than a decade and no new foster children entered their household during that time.
Dolezal dismissed that possibility, saying it maligned the intent of foster parents.
“I think we could imagine edge cases in which that would be the case, but I know that the 2,300 families who are currently fostering in the state of Georgia are not doing it for their daily stipend,” he said. “They are doing it for love of the children.”
SB 152 passed 32-22. It now heads to the Georgia House of Representatives, where Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, was a strong advocate for the legislation that created the voucher program last year.