by Ty Tagami | Jun 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — When younger students return to Georgia public schools this fall, they will learn an old-school skill: handwriting.
New changes to the state standards for English Language Arts will require the teaching of cursive writing in elementary school. The state Board of Education approved the standards overhaul two years ago but gave teachers until this fall to prepare.
Georgia is joining other states, from Alabama to Texas, that are resurrecting a skill that had seemingly gone the way of the dodo after the proliferation of laptops and touchscreen devices. Even California, the cradle of computer keyboards, passed a law requiring cursive in schools in 2023.
Compulsory cursive writing has been tucked into dozens of pages that describe the standards for English in elementary school.
The state board approved the revised standards in a 13-1 vote in May 2023.
In third grade, students will have to learn how to read phrases and sentences in cursive, and they will practice forming letters and word connectors. By fifth grade, they will be called on to write whole texts in cursive, “legibly and efficiently,” with appropriate spacing throughout. All along, they will be working on fine motor skills that some feared had gone extinct.
At a state school board meeting last month, Richard Woods, the elected state school superintendent, introduced a new initiative to promote those loopy letters: the John Hancock Award will go to schools that demonstrate excellence in cursive.
“Cursive writing is more than just a skill — it strengthens fine motor development, improves literacy, and connects students to historical documents in their original form,” the award description says.
Woods got big applause when he mentioned the new requirements at the Republican state convention in Dalton in early June.
People clapped when he announced that students would have to learn about personal finances. But the audience erupted when he said cursive writing was back.
“Every student will own their signature. Every student will know how to read our original documents in their original script,” Woods said, adding that children should be able to read the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and other texts handwritten by the nation’s founders.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 24, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — When Kaycee Maruscsak’s baby died before birth, she had to carry the infant’s corpse in her womb for more than a week because, she said, doctors refused to remove it for fear of violating Georgia’s abortion restrictions.
“I should not have had to wait eight days to have a dead baby removed out of me,” she said at the state Capitol Tuesday.
The story of the 31-year-old Lilburn woman was part of the bitter testimony during a state Senate Urban Affairs Committee hearing that Democrats hope will galvanize Georgia voters against Republicans, who backed the state’s new limits on abortion. They scheduled the hearing on the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the decades-old legal precedent that had guaranteed women’s right to abortion.
No Republican officials appeared for the hearing, including Attorney General Chris Carr. He had declined the Democrats’ invitation to talk about Georgia’s abortion law, which bans the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around six weeks from conception.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization allowed Georgia’s 2019 abortion restrictions to take full effect last year, after a delay caused by a lawsuit.
Pregnant women have subsequently been denied medical care in Georgia during miscarriages because of uncertainty among doctors about whether they could face prosecution for it.
In one highly publicized case, Amber Nicole Thurman died after doctors delayed removing remnants of her fetus after she self-aborted the baby by taking pills.
Her mother, Shanette Williams, asserted her death was caused by doctors.
“She didn’t just die. She was murdered by the people who took the oath to do no harm,” said Williams, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing via Zoom. She said her daughter died of sepsis, which she said could have been avoided with a 3-minute procedure that she said was withheld for 20 hours.
She described taking her grandson, now 8, to scatter Skittles over his mother’s grave — one of her favorite snacks — on a rainy Mother’s Day.
Democratic senators and others who testified blamed a “vague” Georgia abortion ban that they said creates an “air of criminality” around women who miscarry or need an abortion for a medical reason. They skewered Carr, who is running for governor, saying he could reduce the number of these incidents by issuing an opinion clarifying when abortion is legal under the law.
Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, called Carr’s absence “shameful.”
At a press conference after the hearing, the Democratic senators drove home their point with a poster showing Carr’s smiling portrait on a milk carton, under the word “missing.”
Carr’s office told Capitol Beat that he informed the committee weeks ago that he had longstanding commitments and could not attend the hearing.
“It’s disappointing to see a serious topic overshadowed by partisan theatrics,” Carr’s office said.
Maruscsak, who had to carry her daughter, Sawyer, in her womb for a week after the baby’s heartbeat stopped, described her struggles to find medical care.
She said she visited multiple doctors and abortion clinics and even waited seven hours in an emergency room overflow bed, while bleeding, and couldn’t get the fetus removed despite symptoms of sepsis.
Maruscsak said she had placenta previa, whereby the placenta attaches to the wrong part of the uterus. She said she had to leave the emergency room to find a doctor who was bold enough to remove the fetus despite the abortion ban, eventually trying as many as five doctors.
She predicted that other Georgia women will have the same life-threatening experience.
“This issue will touch every family in some way, someday,” she said.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 20, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Alabama company that planned to mine titanium dioxide next to the Okefenokee Swamp has agreed to sell its property to an environmental fund, ending — for now — a threat to more than 350,000 acres of designated national wilderness that is home to several endangered and threatened species.
The Conservation Fund announced Friday that it had agreed to buy Twin Pines Minerals’ property on Trail Ridge near the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, ending a six-year effort to protect North America’s largest blackwater swamp.
“By purchasing this land from Twin Pines, The Conservation Fund will ensure that the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge remains wild and unspoiled for all Americans,” Stacy Funderburke, the Fund’s vice president for the central Southeast region, said in a statement.
Funderburke said in an interview that the Fund had agreed to pay about $60 million for the nearly 8,000-acre property. The transaction will occur in two phases, with the first phase Friday involving a transaction for 40% of the purchase price and the final closing July 31. He said his organization continues to raise money for that final phase-two transaction.
Twin Pines had no comment but confirmed the sale through a spokesman.
The fund pulled together money from private donors with the help of advocacy group One Hundred Miles.
“Twin Pines’ decision to sell their land to a conservation buyer instead of to a mining company is a respectable response to the hundreds of thousands of voices who have spoken out against the mining proposal,” Megan Desrosiers, president and CEO of One Hundred Miles, said in a statement.
Alice Keyes, a vice president of One Hundred Miles, credited “the unbelievable public outcry” against mining the swamp.
About a quarter million people submitted comments against the mining project to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and to the state of Georgia, said the Southern Environmental Law Center, which worked against the mine.
“It was one of the largest public campaigns that I have ever been involved in,” said Keyes, who has worked on environmental issues for three decades.
The Okefenokee is a rich ecosystem hosting bald eagles, bobcats, black bears, and 13,000 alligators. Wood storks, indigo snakes and red-cockaded woodpeckers are among the endangered and threatened species that rely on the swamp.
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who has been involved in the effort to stop the mine, called the purchase “great news for all Georgians and our beloved natural treasure.”
Threats remain, though.
Josh Marks, president of Georgians for the Okefenokee, said the purchase was a “huge victory” to protect a natural treasure “from a dangerous project promoted by an atrocious company. But the threat is not over by a long shot.”
The Conservation Fund struck a deal with DuPont in the early 2000s to stop a different titanium dioxide mine.
Marks is worried that Chemours, which spun off from DuPont a decade ago, could still mine nearby private property, and said the General Assembly should pass the Okefenokee Protection Act, legislation that has stalled.
Funderburke agreed that a couple other private properties nearby could also be mined, but said the Twin Pines sale reduced the risk. He said the company’s inability to secure a mining permit after six years of trying could discourage other mining efforts. And he said that such a large mine so close to the swamp would have set a terrible precedent.
He said other options besides outright purchases exist, such as buying conservation easements.
“The threat is not over, so the drumbeat should continue,” Funderburke said. “But this is a really important milestone in the fight against mining in the Okefenokee.”
That drumbeat has been growing louder.
Sonny Perdue, a former Republican governor of Georgia, has pushed for protecting the swamp. The long-serving cabinet member during President Donald Trump’s first term is now chancellor of the University System of Georgia. In April, Perdue urged U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to support the years-long effort to get the national wildlife refuge designated as a United Nations World Heritage Site.
The letter, which Perdue sent on Board of Regents letterhead, cited a study by an environmental conservation group that said the designation would be an economic boon for the area around the Okefenokee.
Others have used the economic argument as well. The Southern Environmental Law Center noted that the Okefenokee draws more than 700,000 visits a year, supporting more than 750 jobs and generating about $65 million in annual economic activity for the four counties around the Okefenokee.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 20, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — This fall, thousands of Georgia students will attend a private school or study at home, and state government will help them pay for it.
Republican lawmakers led a push last year to give families $6,500 a year per student toward private education.
Georgia already had a state-funded voucher program, but it was limited to students with disabilities or certain medical conditions. Another program for all students was funded through tax credits rather than money directly from the state treasury.
The new state-funded “Promise Scholarship” program doesn’t require a disability. It only requires that students live in the attendance zone of a public school performing in the bottom 25% statewide. The student either must have attended it for a year or be a rising kindergartner.
As of Monday, nearly 13,000 had applied for a scholarship and more than 8,300 were considered preliminarily eligible, which translates to a cost of between $54 million and $84 million for the upcoming school year.
The application period runs through June, so more may apply, and there will be two more windows to apply during the upcoming school year.
The money can go toward tuition and fees at approved schools. It can also offset home school costs, paying for curriculum and even medical and therapeutic services by approved providers. Transportation costs are covered, too, at up to $500 per year.
As of Monday, about 60% of the preliminarily eligible students had said they wanted to attend a private school, the rest choosing home school or other educational support services or not yet making a selection, according to the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which operates the program through a public non-profit organization. Nearly 400 private Georgia schools had been approved or were approved but still completing the registration process this week, with 150 applications denied. More than half of the approved schools were in greater metro Atlanta, with about three dozen in the city of Atlanta. Columbus, Macon and Savannah also had numerous approved schools.
More than 300 service providers made the approved list. About a third of them were outside Georgia, with several in California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and Florida.
Critics contended that most of the families that used the scholarships would be wealthy since they would be able to cover the cost between the state subsidy and tuition that can run to $10,000 or more.
So far, about three quarters of the preliminarily eligible students are from households earning less than 400% of the federal poverty threshold, or $106,600 a year for a family of three and $128,600 for a family of four.
Opponents of the program, including most Democrats in the General Assembly and public-school advocacy groups, argued that fly-by-night schools would take the money without properly educating the students. In the end, they said, these students would return to public schools and become their burden.
So the GOP lawmakers who pushed the bill added a requirement that all students in the program must take either the same state exams as public school students or one of three national “norm-referenced” tests to be selected by the state.
Private schools will have to report the results, along with other information, such as attendance rates and graduation rates.
Program proponents argued that public schools could not properly serve all 1.7 million students attending one in Georgia.
Shakia McCrary’s son, a rising second grader, will be among those leaving his neighborhood public school this fall.
He has learning disabilities that can lead to misbehavior if he is not kept on task, she said, describing how a teacher would put him on speaker phone so she could calm him down.
His public school in Fort Valley, south of Macon, lacks enough specialized staff to give him the attention he needs, McCrary said. So she is considering two private schools within a half hour drive because, she said, they have smaller class sizes.
The state-funded scholarship will cover all but about $1,000 of the tuition cost at each school, said McCrary, who works for a federal health insurance program.
She is thankful for the promise scholarships.
“Private school, it crossed my mind, but I knew that I just couldn’t afford it and still be able to live comfortably,” she said. If not for the state funding, her son would be heading back to public school this fall, she said, and she would be dealing with the same issues.
Republican lawmakers had been pushing for years to get the program approved, finally gathering enough votes to squeak Senate Bill 233 into law last year.
Sen. Larry Walker III, R-Perry, the Senate majority caucus secretary, sees the subsidies as an “incredibly popular” issue for his party.
“This school choice program is not just a life changer for the students and families that participate. It’s also a party expander,” Walker said at the Georgia GOP convention in Dalton in early June. “School choice introduces new constituents to our Republican values. It allows them to understand that it’s conservative Republicans, not liberal Democrats, who are fighting for better opportunities for working folks and families.”
On Thursday, fellow Senate Republicans voted to nominate Walker as their next president pro tempore. The full Senate will vote on his promotion to top-ranked senator when the body reconvenes in January.
Meanwhile, one group backing SB 233 is now promoting the scholarships, hoping as many parents as possible will access the $141 million that lawmakers allocated to it this year. Americans for Prosperity has placed four billboards around DeKalb County advertising the program, and volunteers have handwritten about 5,000 postcards to likely parents they think should know about it, said Tony West, the organization’s director in Georgia.
“We worked very hard to see Senate Bill 233 pass,” West said, “and now we want to work just as hard to make sure it’s a success.”
by Ty Tagami | Jun 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A major shakeup is underway in the leadership of the Georgia Senate, after the Republican caucus elected a new majority leader and tentatively named a new president pro tempore.
The two positions rank just below the lieutenant governor, who is elected by voters statewide.
Republicans, who control the Senate, selected Sen. Jason Anavitarte, R-Dallas, Tuesday as the new majority leader through next year, the second half of the two-year legislative biennium.
As the lead strategist for Senate Republicans, Anavitarte, who has served in the Senate since 2021, said he will “meet this moment with focus, discipline, and a commitment to improving lives across our state.”
Anavitarte’s promotion to third in command, behind the lieutenant governor and president pro tempore, leaves his caucus chair position vacant.
Likewise, an internal caucus vote Tuesday to nominate Sen. Larry Walker III, R-Perry, as the next president pro tempore, would create another leadership vacancy. Walker, in the Senate since 2015, is majority caucus secretary (and also chairs the Senate Committee on Insurance and Labor). The full Senate will vote on his promotion when the body reconvenes in January.
The big shuffle was triggered by the anticipated departure of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. He has not yet announced a run for governor but is widely expected to do so, as the term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp prepares to leave office after next year.
Jones’ expected departure has prompted two top Senate leaders to run for lieutenant governor.
Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, the former majority leader, declared for Jones’ seat in mid-May. Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon, the former president pro tem, announced the same intention at the Republican state convention in Dalton in early June.
Assuming Jones vacates his spot atop the Senate, four of the six Senate Republican leadership posts below Jones will change hands for next year’s legislative session.
