ATLANTA — Another Georgia legislative initiative this year seeks to build on prior efforts to increase the reading and writing performance of young students.
“We must teach our children to read,” Rep. Chris Erwin, R-Homer, chairman of the House Education committee, said Monday about the new initiative. “We must have the belief that all of our children can read on grade level.”
Erwin is the chief co-sponsor of House Bill 1193, which is backed by leaders in both the House and Senate. The Senate even has its own version of essentially the same bill.
The Georgia Early Literacy Act of 2026 would require sweeping changes, from mandatory curriculum and teacher training to routine testing and state-funded tutoring for children. The legislation also would encourage but not require kindergarten attendance. Students who skipped kindergarten and then failed a literacy test would have to start in kindergarten even if they were old enough for first grade.
One of the most far-reaching proposals would amend the state education funding formula. The legislation would send state money to every school district to hire a classroom literacy coach in each school that has kindergarten through third grade classrooms. (K-3 schools with fewer than 200 students would only get a part-time coach though.)
The wholistic approach is necessary because teaching and learning to read is difficult work, said Erwin, a retired school superintendent. “So it’s got to be planned; it’s got to be precise.”
The Legislature has not yet published a cost associated with the initiative.
But House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, said at the start of this year’s legislative session that literacy was among his top agenda items this year, a position he reiterated last week. He said the state was prepared to pay for classroom reinforcements.
“How many Georgians would be leading happy, healthy, fulfilling lives if they had only been able to read?” he asked at a news conference.
A House subcommittee voted unanimously Monday to send HB 1193 to the House Education committee. Before the vote, several parents commented favorably, including Jeremy Hendrix from Gwinnett County, who said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the legislation.
“It is amazing what you are doing and especially in this political climate where we can see everybody get behind one cart and push in the same direction,” he said. “I really appreciate that and it makes my heart happy as a citizen.”
ATLANTA — With affordability a top concern of voters, Georgia lawmakers are moving to insulate electricity ratepayers from costs driven by demand from power-guzzling data centers.
Late last year, the state Public Service Commission authorized a Georgia Power request to expand its power production by nearly 10 gigawatts, mostly to serve current and projected demand from data centers.
That expansion will require the construction of new methane-burning facilities, and House Bill 1063 seeks to ensure that those costs are borne only by data centers.
Data center electricity costs are a top concern, said Rep. Brad Thomas, R-Holly Springs, chief co-sponsor the bill.
Lawmakers have heard from people across the state that ratepayers are concerned their electrical bills will rise because of data centers, he said. The main concern, he said, is that Georgia Power’s demand projections will prove inaccurate, leading the company to build excess capacity and then pass on the costs.
“We have heard that concern and we are going to address it,” Thomas said Friday after a House committee unanimously passed HB 1063.
A similar measure — Senate Bill 34 — awaits a hearing in the Senate.
During the hearing Friday on Thomas’ bill, advocates for the public, for the environment and for data centers said they supported the measure but had concerns about some of the details.
Thomas took that to mean he had struck the right compromise between their competing interests.
A Georgia Power executive who testified said the company was neither for nor against the bill. Many of the protections the legislation would codify are already required by Public Service Commission regulations, an agency representative said, but regulations can change and passage of HB 1063 would write the requirements into law.
ATLANTA — A federal judge in Atlanta has given the administration of President Donald Trump until Tuesday to give the court the documentation that led to the seizure of Fulton County ballots from the 2020 presidential election.
The order signed Saturday by U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee also unsealed the court file for the subsequent lawsuit against the Trump administration that was brought by Fulton County Commission Chairman Rob Pitts.
Pitts sued after the Jan. 28 raid on a county elections warehouse, when FBI agents entered a county property in Union City and left with 2020 ballots.
“The Court’s action affirms that this case is a matter of public interest, in Fulton County and beyond,” Pitts said in a statement Sunday. “Fulton County will continue to pursue every legal option to seek the return of election records and to defend our elections from possible takeover.”
The order by Judge Boulee of the Northern District of Georgia gives the federal government until 5 p.m. Tuesday to produce the affidavit that the government filed to obtain the search warrant.
Pitts said county staff were continuing to prepare for the 2026 election, “which will be once again free, fair, transparent and legally compliant.”
ATLANTA – Legislation to strip librarians of their criminal immunity from a law that makes it illegal to give “harmful” books and other content to minors is moving quickly through the Georgia General Assembly, after passing a House committee in a partisan vote Friday.
Conservatives and religious advocates have been pushing for years to revoke the librarian exemption from a 1980s obscenity law that makes it a crime to knowingly give a minor a visual, written or recorded work depicting sex or sexuality in a way that offends the “prevailing standards” of a community.
The Senate legislation that passed one of the state House’s judiciary committees Friday would subject librarians in public libraries, schools and colleges to prosecution for violating that law.
Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, discussing Senate Bill 74 at the Georgia Capitol on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. His legislation would expose librarians to jail for violating a decades-old law against giving “harmful” books and other such material to minors. (Ashtin Barker/Capitol Beat)
Previously, Senate Bill 74 sought to remove the librarian shield entirely. But amendments added Friday would only take it from librarians who fail to comply with their library or school board decisions concerning complaints about books and other materials.
“If the librarian follows what the governing board says, then that’s it, the end,” said Rep. Soo Hong, R-Lawrenceville, who based her amendment off wording suggested by a West Georgia library director at a previous hearing.
The bill passed 6-5 along party lines, with Democrats opposed.
Critics have long contended that the move to strip librarians of their legal protection is part of a strategy to scrub libraries of books about sexuality and gender orientation. SB 74 relies on a section of state law that includes sexual conduct as content considered to be harmful to minors. The law’s definition of sexual conduct includes “acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse … .”
Rep. Shea Roberts, D-Atlanta, argued that SB 74, in conjunction with that existing definition, would lead to the banning of books “where two boys are holding hands.”
Rep. Rob Leverett, R-Elberton, disagreed with her interpretation. “It’s talking about sexual contact, contact involving, you know, our privates,” he said.
Leverett also disagreed with Rep. Esther Panitch, D-Sandy Springs, who predicted that the bill, should it become law, would effectively become a book “ban” by encouraging extreme caution among library boards.
They would become “censorship boards,” she said.
“When the choice is between keeping a challenged book on the shelf or exposing your libraries to prosecution, the book will lose every time,” Panitch said, adding that one arrest and mugshot of a librarian who defended a controversial book would cause every library in the state to remove it.
Giving harmful material to a minor is a misdemeanor of “a high and aggravated nature,” punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000.
Leverett said the legislation was not a ban because it would only require moving certain books to age-restricted parts of libraries.
“That’s a great difference,” he said. “I would agree with you if we were talking about burning them or taking them out of the library altogether.”
At a prior hearing this week, a member of the public commented against the measure by observing that a book for children had been attacked because it named male and female genitalia.
A Republican lawmaker shot back: “is it the librarian’s responsibility to teach my children what a vagina and a penis is?” The lawmaker, Rep. Charlice Byrd, R-Woodstock, said a parent should decide when to expose their child to such information.
The next stop for SB 74 will be the House Rules committee, which gets to decide whether to put the measure to a vote by the full House. The bill has already passed the Senate, in a party-line vote last year, the first year of this biennial session.
Should the House pass it with the new amendments, the Senate would need to agree to the changes before it would move to the governor’s desk.
The main sponsor of the legislation, Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, told the House committee members Friday that he supported their changes.
ATLANTA — The state House completed its proposed adjustments to the current year budget, sending the Senate its changes to Gov. Brian Kemp’s spending plan for the state through June.
The $42.3 billion amended fiscal year budget approved overwhelmingly Thursday left the governor’s plan mostly intact, but there were a few significant changes.
The House trimmed $80 million from Kemp’s $1.8 billion project to add express lanes to I-75 south of Atlanta. The lawmakers also cut $25 million from the governor’s $325 million proposal to establish a college scholarship fund for students from low-income households.
The House instead put money into myriad projects, including prison cells, mental health facilities, rural infrastructure and medical education.
One major switch saved a bit of money. Kemp wanted to return $1 billion to taxpayers in the form of one-time income tax rebates averaging $250 per filer ($500 for married couples).
The House wants to return $150 million less, and to different people. The proposal passed by a 167-5 vote would return $850 million to homeowners through property tax relief grants.
“This grant will reduce next year’s tax bills for homeowners, and we will continue to eliminate property taxes on your home,” said Rep. Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, chairman of the House Appropriations committee.
Property tax relief is a priority for House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington. He has said he wants to gradually reduce homeowner property taxes until 2032 when they would be abolished.
The Senate, meanwhile, wants to reduce and then eliminate the state income tax.
The House added several big-ticket items. It wants to spend $220 million to design and build a new private prison for low-risk inmates, which would free up 480 beds in state prisons.
The House proposal also adds nearly $30 million to retrofit a building at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro for a new optometry college. And it puts $27 million towards a new hospital in Atlanta to create bed space for mental health and forensic patients and adds $50 million for rural infrastructure projects. It also puts nearly $83 million toward a deficit in the Division of Family and Children Services, with $1.6 million to restore four foster care support contracts that had been cut to save money.
The Senate will now have a chance to make its own amendments to the mid-year budget as the House turns to the full budget for fiscal year 2027, which will fund government starting in July.
