by Ty Tagami | Feb 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
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 they move to the back of the line if their household income exceeds 400% of the federal poverty line, meaning a family of four must have earned $124,800 or less last year to be among those eligible if the money allocated by the state is running out.
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.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 27, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
The Georgia House of Representatives on Thursday adopted its own version of legislation that would limit transgender student competition in school sports, making the final passage of a law on the topic more likely after a similar bill passed the Senate earlier this month.
House Bill 267 was approved 102-54, with a couple of Democrats crossing party lines to vote with Republicans for passage. It would open schools and colleges to lawsuits for allowing transgender athletes born male to compete against girls and women.
The measure, like Senate Bill 1, which the Senate adopted in a near party-line vote the first week of February, would also prohibit transgender students born male from using locker rooms designated for females.
House Republicans called HB 276 a “common sense” measure that protects girls from more powerful transgender athletes and reinforces a binary division of the sexes.
Democrats excoriated Republicans for a “weird” obsession with a group of people who comprise a tiny fraction of the population, attributing their motive to “hate” and to pandering to conservative Christian voters.
The legislation addresses more than sports: it would replace the word “gender” with the word “sex” throughout most of Georgia’s law books.
Democrats asserted this would “erase” transgender people, removing legal protections.
“It is a calculated, dangerous, deeply discriminatory piece of legislation that goes far beyond the realm of athletics,” said Rep. Karla Drenner, D-Avondale Estates. “Let’s call this the Erasure of Transgender Georgians Act.”
Drenner called the concerns raised about transgender athletes in sport a “manufactured crisis by the most extreme factions of the Republican Party.”
Republicans said they had addressed concerns about hate crimes against transgender people with an amendment that kept the term “gender” in that part of the law.
GOP lawmakers responded to the accusation of playing politics by saying transgender athletes are a real threat to girls and women.
Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, reacted in kind to the allegation that her party was obsessed with a non-issue by saying it was “weird” that collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines was defeated by a transgender athlete at an NCAA competition at Georgia Tech in 2022.
HB 267 is named the Riley Gaines Act because of that much-publicized incident.
“We’re just trying to keep biological males from slide tackling our daughters on the soccer field,” Ehrhart said.
Rep. Chris Erwin, R-Homer, a former school superintendent and the chairman of the House Education Committee, called it a “measured, reasonable and necessary response to growing concerns.”
Gaines testified for HB 267 at a hearing in Erwin’s committee last week. She said via Zoom that she’d learned from other women about transgender athletes dominating their competitions, too, but she didn’t go into detail.
Democrats on Thursday countered that if transgender athletes were a significant problem for female sports, Republicans wouldn’t have had to name their bill after an out-of-state athlete.
Gaines swam for the University of Kentucky.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 26, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
People caught with a quarter gram of fentanyl would face one to five years in prison if a measure that passed the Georgia Senate Wednesday goes on to become law.
It’s a tiny amount, but it’s enough to kill 120 people, said Sen. Russ Goodman, R-Cogdell, in explaining why he sponsored Senate Bill 79.
The measure, which gained approval in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, would lower the threshold prison time based on the amount of the drug possessed.
Under the bill, possession of a quarter gram to four grams could draw a decade in prison. Also, the mandatory minimum prison sentence for trafficking would be much higher than for the same amount of a traditional drug, such as cocaine or heroin.
“If other illegal drugs are a BB gun, fentanyl is a nuclear bomb,” Goodman said. “I say that to say, if you look at the numbers, the people that were killed combined at the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima roughly equals the amount of Americans that die every year from fentanyl.”
A couple hundred thousand were killed by those atomic bombs, while the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimates about 107,000 overdose deaths from all drugs in 2023. Still, fentanyl poses an unprecedented threat because trace amounts can be fatal.
Gus and Beth Walters from Valdosta lost their son, Austin, four years ago at the age of 30 when he took a Xanax laced with fentanyl. In their grief, they emailed Goodman hoping to make something meaningful from his death.
Last year, the General Assembly passed Austin’s Law, which makes it a felony to manufacture or sell any substance containing fentanyl that causes a death.
“It’s really healed a wound for us that is deep,” Gus Walters said Wednesday after SB 79 passed 50-3. The bill now goes to the state House of Representatives, which last year amended the Senate’s version of Austin’s Law to exempt manslaughter that resulted from mere possession, noted Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs.
McLaurin and two other Democrats were among the three senators who voted against SB 79. He explained ahead of his vote that he was concerned that the legislation would send people to prison for mere possession and not just for trafficking.
“When you criminalize possession, you are criminalizing addiction … which is a mental health problem, it is a disease,” he said, adding that prison isn’t a great place to overcome addiction. He likened the measure to the War on Drugs in the late 20th century, which was criticized for overwhelming America’s prisons.
Goodman noted that SB 79 only would require mandatory minimum sentencing for possession of four or more grams, which he said is in the realm of trafficking. Judges could order suspended sentences or probation for convictions involving lower amounts, he said.
Gus Walters said after the vote that he’d rather his son had been convicted and jailed than lying in a grave. Beth Walters said the couple believe in addiction recovery.
“We are not saying that you should not have recovery programs. What we’re trying to do is to save lives so they can get to recovery,” she said. “We keep going down the road we’re going down right now. We’re not going to have anybody left to send to recovery.”
McLaurin said he hopes the House does to SB 79 what it did to Austin’s Law last year, downplaying the legal consequences for possession.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 26, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
Georgia Senate Republicans are trying again to strip librarians of their immunity from a law against distributing pornography to minors.
A law dating back to the 1960s makes it illegal to distribute materials to minors deemed to be “harmful” to them. Librarians were exempted from the law during the 1980s.
Senate Bill 74, which the Senate Education and Youth Committee approved Tuesday, would take away that exemption. The bill is the latest of several efforts Senate Republicans have made during the last several years to apply the law to librarians.
Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, the chief sponsor of SB 74, said at a hearing on the measure that it made no sense to require staff at convenience and book stores to discern what content is harmful while absolving trained experts of that responsibility.
“I love libraries,” said Burns, who has worked as an administrator and a professor in higher education in Georgia. “I encourage people to use libraries. But it does not make any sense for us to exempt the very people who should best know what would be harmful to children.”
Although SB 74 would expose librarians to prosecution, it would afford all library staff a way to defend themselves if they accidentally allow harmful material into the hands of a minor. They must have “knowingly” let it happen to be found guilty.
The bill now moves to the Senate Rules Committee to schedule a vote of the full Senate.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
Georgia public schools were short 5,300 teachers as of December, an ongoing problem state lawmakers have been unable to fix.
They have a new proposed solution, but it would take awhile to put in place: let more retired teachers return to the classroom with both pay and pensions.
Senate Bill 150 would allow former teachers to return to the classroom 60 days after they retire following 25 years of service.
It would expand on a current, but temporary law, that lets teachers return to the classroom after a year of retirement following 30 years of service.
That older law restricts this post-retirement service to a handful of high-demand academic subjects in high-vacancy parts of the state. About 450 retired teachers have been re-employed under that law, which is in its third year and expires next year.
The proposed law would expire in the summer of 2034.
“We’ve got a real issue that we’ve got to deal with,” Sen. Billy Hickman, R-Statesboro, said Tuesday of the teacher shortage. He is the chief sponsor of SB 150, which he said would address the problem “on a temporary basis until our schools can gear up.”
A Senate committee voted unanimously to pass the bill on for a cost analysis. However, it likely won’t come up for further action until next year’s legislative session.
