The House’s expansive education bill is dead — but that doesn’t mean school choice is off the table this session.

The Senate Education Committee on Tuesday killed House Bill 2, the House’s omnibus education package, which contained a key element of expanding school choice with education savings accounts, which allows public dollars to be used for private schooling.

School choice, a years-long movement that’s gained momentum in Mississippi in recent months, refers to policies aimed at giving parents more power over their children’s education. But these policies vary widely. Some, such as education savings accounts, give parents public dollars to pay for private school tuition. A more limited option, called portability or open enrollment, would make it easier for students to transfer between public schools. 

The committee vote came weeks before the deadline for Senate committees to vote on House measures, so it sent a clear signal that the Senate is not open to passing legislation that allows families to use public dollars for private schools. A Senate portability bill that loosens regulations around public school transfers awaits a vote in the House.  

But the House could still try to push its measure back through. 

“I think all options are on the table,” House Speaker Jason White told Mississippi Today this week. 

The likely option available to House leaders is to find a similar education bill to add school choice provisions to, such as House Bill 517, which is a so-called “dummy bill” that doesn’t make any changes to the law and only brings charter school code sections forward, or Senate Bill 2002, the open enrollment bill. 

Rep. Rodney Hall, a Republican from Southaven, supported White’s school choice plan and said that the House should try to amend a similar education bill, insert its education savings account language in it and send the bill back to the Senate for consideration. 

“We’re not at the point where we need to negotiate to something a lot more watered down like the Senate had,” Hall said. “I think that we should continue to push strong on it. It’s still early. The session’s not over yet, I don’t think it’s time to get worried or anything like that.” 

But if White keeps pushing a vote on the House floor, things might get hairy. His education bill eked out of the chamber by a two-vote margin, and a majority of the 122-member chamber didn’t vote for it. 

It passed the majority-GOP chamber by 61-59. A key reason it passed out of the chamber is that two House members didn’t vote. One of them was at home repairing broken farm equipment, and another intentionally didn’t vote on the measure, even though he was at the Capitol that day. 

READ MORE: ‘Absent’ Republicans, heavy whipping help Speaker Jason White pass school-choice bill

A key question White will have to answer is whether he wants to force his chamber and the GOP caucus to vote on the divisive issue again, perhaps by continuing to rely on key legislators not voting or being absent from the Capitol. 

Republican Sen. Chuck Younger of Columbus is also pondering this political question, and he told Mississippi Today the speaker should just give up on trying to secure legislation giving public tax dollars for parents to use on private school education. 

“I think he should quit putting his Republican representatives in a tough vote all the time,” Younger said. 

Younger’s House counterpart, Republican Rep. Dana McLean of Columbus, who voted against House Bill 2, said that she hopes the two chambers come to a compromise. 

“We’ve got some really good legislation that hopefully will survive this session,” she said. “I hope that we can at least get the portability piece through.”

Another option is for Republican Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers into a special session to deal with school choice, which would suspend legislative deadlines and put more pressure on lawmakers.

However, the governor is busy right now leading the state’s response to a winter storm that hammered north Mississippi, and he has postponed indefinitely his annual state of the state address to the Legislature because of the storm.  

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the possibility of a special session over school choice. White meets regularly with Reeves, but the speaker did not say whether he and the governor had spoken recently about a special session. 

“We talk frequently, but I don’t know that that’s been decided on yet,” White said. “I know that he’s passionate on the issue, and he’s certainly not timid about using whatever tools he has in his toolbox on an issue when he does feel passionate.”

Reeves has only called lawmakers into a special session to deal with economic development projects and to pass a budget when legislators last year failed to agree on one because of infighting. 

The governor has never called a special session over a policy issue and has previously said many times he does not want to spend taxpayer dollars to have lawmakers at an impasse in a lengthy special session. However, he lambasted Senate leadership on social media after they killed the House bill.