Members of the House K-12 Subcommittee voted Tuesday to advance a bill designed to reduce the number of fourth-grade students held back under the state’s new Third-Grade Retention Law.The new law allows third-graders who fail to show reading proficiency on state tests in the spring of their third-grade year to advance to the fourth grade through summer school and/or tutoring in their fourth-grade year. Those children who receive tutoring still need to show “adequate growth” on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) in the fourth-grade to advance to the fifth-grade.

Tennessee Charter School Center (TCSC) Chief Executive Officer Dr. Maya Bugg announced she will be stepping down in early summer after leading the organization for the last nine years. The center plans to name an interim CEO and conduct a search for a long-term replacement following the 2024 legislation session.

The House Government Operations Committee advanced Governor Bill Lee’s Education Freedom Scholarship Act Monday with a positive recommendation following a sometimes testy debate on accountability and costs.The legislation would expand on the concept of the existing Education Savings Account (ESA) pilot program in Davidson, Shelby, and Hamilton counties to allow families across the state to send their children to private school with taxpayer dollars.

Members of the House Education Administration Committee advanced legislation Wednesday that supporters say will help the state do a better job connecting students with the actual jobs available in their communities.That bill, sponsored by Representative Chris Hurt, R-Halls, would require the state to create a publicly available dashboard that includes data employers and students could use to see how well various instructional programs are working in Tennessee.

Members of the House K-12 Subcommittee turned their focus to school safety Wednesday by voting on a series of bills designed to prevent future school shootings, including prior legislation from last year’s Special Session on Public Safety.One that received considerable attention is a bill to update safety measures listed in the Safe Schools Act of 2023, by requiring an improved standard of window film or security glass on each exterior door and any glass adjoining an exterior door. This change would include replacing the quarter-inch thick windows in schools with thicker and stronger glass that would be considered bullet-resistant.

The House Education Instruction Committee advanced legislation Tuesday that would require Tennessee students to watch a fetal development video created by a group that opposes abortion rights.The committee voted on party lines in favor of Representative Gino Bulso’s, R-Brentwood, family life curriculum bill requiring schoolchildren to watch “Meet Baby Olivia.” Abortion rights opposition group Live Action created the three-minute ultrasound computer animation focusing on the development of a fetus for family life curriculums.

The House Higher Education Subcommittee killed another attempt to change discrimination protection policies at Tennessee universities and higher education institutions.Committee members voted down proposed legislation from Representative John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, Monday that would have prevented state universities and universities that receive state funding from creating antidiscrimination policies or recognizing protected classes that are not recognized by the state.

Walter Blanks Jr. says his experience with public schools growing up in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio was hard.Blanks says he struggled to learn how to read and was bullied to the extent his mother feared for his safety.  That changed when his family took advantage of a school choice program that allowed Blanks to attend a private school.

Two years ago, Linton Beck unexpectedly suffered a cardiac arrest in his chemistry class.The Station Camp High School senior is alive today and able to talk about his experience thanks to the quick work of school staff and their training.Beck says a school nurse and teachers responded within minutes to perform CPR and a school resource officer restarted his heart with an automated external defibrillator (AED).

Eight State Representatives who currently don’t have public charter schools in their home counties played a crucial role in advancing a bill to support the more than 40 thousand students who do attend those schools elsewhere.Representatives Ryan Williams, Cookeville; Mark Cochran, R-Englewood; Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby; David Hawk, R-Greeneville; Patsy Hazlewood, R-Signal Mountain; Tim Hicks, R-Gray; Jerome Moon, R-Maryville; and Charlie Baum, R-Murfreesboro all voted in favor of legislation designed to provide better school facilities to charter students at Wednesday’s House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee. The vote was considered to be one of the larger hurdles the bill will face this session.The legislation would require local school districts that have public charter schools in them to provide a list of vacant and underutilized buildings on an annual basis. Under the bill, school districts would additionally be required to make those properties available to public charter schools at a fair market value and give charters a first right of refusal for either purchase or lease.“There are school buildings that are also vacant or underutilized all across the state but often access to these buildings is extremely difficult if not impossible. Instead, charter schools in Tennessee must finance, locate, build, update, or renovate facilities to use as school buildings,” said bill sponsor Representative Williams.Supporters say the legislation will go a long way towards helping with the facilities funding gap charters across the state are facing. A recent report by the organization ExcelinEd found current state funding is only meeting 50 percent of charter facilities needs and this gap is expected to grow to just 42 percent of facility needs met in five years as more families choose to send their children to public charter schools.This gap also disproportionately impacts economically disadvantaged students and students of color because public charter schools serve a higher percentage of those student groups.Finding a building harder than finding staffThe challenge of finding a building is one STRIVE Collegiate Academy founder LaKendra Butler remembers well from when she founded her school nearly a decade ago in Nashville’s Donelson community. Butler says finding vacant space was more difficult than finding staff to work there.“There wasn’t a ton of spaces in this area that we could utilize so we had to be creative,” said Butler. “The search of a space was clearly impossible.”Butler ended up reaching an agreement to lease space in a building that used to be a hospital.STRIVE has since built out the second floor of the building to serve as a middle school but there have been obstacles to overcome, including a lack of outdoor space for children and classrooms with structural pillars in inconvenient places.Butler says it was luck that made the space possible.“We just so happened to communicate with a community member who had space. It’s not that we found the building, it was we found the person who then was like, oh I may have some space that works,” said Butler.The Tennessee Senate passed the charter facility bill earlier this month on a 23 to 1 vote. It now heads to the full House Finance, Ways, and Means Committee.

Dyersburg Middle School agriculture teacher Melissa Lowry told members of the House K-12 Subcommittee Tuesday that it’s important for her to be able to watch the kids in her class.This is so she can monitor them when handling dangerous equipment such as a table saw.“I have one set of eyes and right now they’re responsible for watching 25 kids. If that number goes to 35, my eyes can’t watch that many kids and so all of those opportunities are then taken away from them,” said Lowry.

The Tennessee State Board of Education is joining the list of government entities that have expressed an interest in changing the state’s new Third-Grade Retention Law.The board unanimously approved a resolution from board member Ryan Holt on Monday asking state lawmakers to reconsider the law and move back the grades where interventions take place to as early as kindergarten.

The State Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission is weighing whether classroom experience should matter more when it comes to reviewing textbooks.The commission is currently working on forming an advisory panel to review science textbooks under consideration for Tennessee schools. The commission selects members of the panel each year through an application process.

Tennessee Senators voted 23 to 1 in favor of legislation designed to improve the school buildings public charter school students across the state attend Thursday.The legislation would require local school districts that have public charter schools in them to provide a list of vacant and underutilized buildings on an annual basis. Under the bill, school districts would additionally be required to make those properties available to public charter schools at a fair market value and give charters a first right of refusal for either purchase or lease. School districts would not be required to sell or lease buildings district leaders want to keep.

When Governor Bill Lee announced his Education Freedom Scholarship Act last year, he made it a point to say the Tennessee General Assembly would work some out critical details like whether participating students will have to take state assessments.That decision has led to three different versions of the Governor’s basic proposal to let up to 20 thousand families use public dollars to attend private school. That question about state assessments is a key difference in each.

Tennessee teachers could receive help with childcare under legislation that advanced from a key House committee Wednesday.Representative Scott Cepicky’s, R-Culleoka, bill would authorize school districts and public charter schools to reimburse teachers 66 percent of their monthly childcare expenses.

State Representative Justin Jones, D-Nashville, represents a district that touches four school clusters with some of the highest performing public charter schools in Nashville.Those charters in east and southeast Nashville include a dozen that outscored the average grade district run public schools received in their cluster on the state’s School Letter Grades assessment. The remaining public charter schools scored equal to the cluster average and 40 percent of the Reward schools in these four clusters are charters.

Tennessee Democrats continued their push for the resignation of Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds Monday, announcing a bill that would allow lawmakers to impeach her for failing to met the necessary qualifications.Representative Caleb Hemmer, D-Nashville, and Senator Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville, are co-sponsoring a bill that would require a Commissioner of Education in Tennessee to reside in the state and provide a process for the legislature to impeach a commissioner for cause.

Three school voucher proposals now before Tennessee lawmakers would create a new statewide program that eventually could open eligibility to all K-12 students, regardless of family income.But the similarities end there.The latest version, filed Monday by House Majority Leader William Lamberth, of Portland, has no testing requirements for students who accept public funding to attend private schools. Gov. Bill Lee’s version doesn’t either, but Senate leaders say that approach is a non-starter.

A bill that would ban pride flags in Tennessee classrooms narrowly managed to advance on a 5-4 vote in the Senate Education Committee Wednesday afternoon following questions from members of both political parties about its potential consequences.Senator Joey HensleySenator Joey Hensley’s, R-Hohenwald, bill would only allow certain flags to be displayed in the classroom. The bill’s House counterpart sponsored by Representative Gino Bulso, R-Brentwood, advanced through key House committees and faces a vote on the House floor next week.