School vouchers are among the legislation that Governor Kemp is pushing for the 2024 session of the General Assembly. It’s become a perennial issue, being kicked along yearly by legislators. The Governor says lawmakers have run out of next year's vouchers. The Senate passed legislation last year to provide Georgia students in low-performing schools with $6,000 scholarships to pay for private school or certain other educational costs.
But the bill died in the House when a coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans joined forces to block it. Democrats have long opposed vouchers as taking tax dollars away from public schools. Rural Republicans expressed concerns that vouchers wouldn’t help their constituents because of the scarcity of private schools in rural communities. The governor says he believes it’s time to take an all of the above approach to education, whether it’s public, private, homeschooling or charter schools.
The governor’s comments about vouchers came during his State of the State address where he sought to draw contracts between his Republican philosophy and Democrats who, predictably, panned the speech saying Kemp’s failure to expand Medicaid means people go without health care and that his support of vouchers will harm public schools. They also fault Kemp’s loosening of gun laws and support of sharply restricting abortion and slammed him for not spending more of the surplus to improve government services.
