A blog for educators, parents, and students devoted to exploring the legal issues surrounding public education in Arkansas and nationwide.
Only a couple of education bills caught my eye this week. All in all, with the legislature more concerned about abortions and guns than ever before, this session has been pretty quite with regards to education. HB1528 – This bill designates the Department of Education as the “authorizer” of charter schools in the state. If …
Parent-trigger laws, or laws that allow parents to intervene when their child’s school is failing, have become increasingly popular over the past several years. Though the laws vary by state, the general concept is that a majority of the parents, and sometimes teachers, in a failing school can petition the school district to take a number of different actions, including …
This legislative session, so far at least, has been all about guns, abortions, and the great Medicaid debate. The legislature has already passed Act 67, the Church Protection Act, which allows churches to permit concealed handguns among their pews, and this of course has led to a number of liability questions that must now be addressed through …
Several legislators filed a bill this week to once again lower the amounts future students will receive from the lottery scholarship. The amounts have been lowered every legislative session since the scholarship’s original enactment in 2009 due to continuing lower than expected revenues from the state-wide lottery. The most recent proposal, HB1295, staggers the amount …
A Texas district court in Austin ruled Monday that the state school funding system is inadequate, inequitable, and unconstitutional. The litigation began when more than 600 school districts, including the Fort Worth Independent School District and several other major North Texas school districts, filed a total of six lawsuits after the Texas Legislature cut $5.5 …
Here are a few of the education bills from the past week or so that have caught my eye: HB1181 – The is the third school choice bill filed this session. This bill allows open school choice except in cases where a transfer would increase the percentage of free/reduced-price lunch students in the nonresident district …
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam elaborated on his education initiatives in his State of the State speech Monday night to the Tennessee General Assembly. In doing so, Haslam defended a bill filed by Tennessee State Senator Mark Norris, a Republican from Collierville, TN, that establishes the Tennessee Choice and Opportunity Scholarship Program. Under this program, 5,000 …
It seems to have been a fairly quite week at the capitol. Only a few notable education bills were filed: HB1076 – Requires the Dept of Education to count students being home-schooled as part of a school district’s average daily membership, which I’m assuming will keep at least a few school districts above 350 for …
Let’s take a look at what happened during the first week of the session. Here are a few bills we knew were coming: SB15 – This bill makes Arkansas a part of the Interstate Military Compact for Education. It most likely will only affect those districts surrounding the air force base. The point of the compact …
While working for Governor Beebe, one of my biggest tasks was reading, analyzing, and tracking all education-related bills as they were filed during legislative sessions. The 2013 session starts Monday, and on this blog, I plan to post frequent updates, as well as my analysis, of many of the education, and some non-education, bills as …