Responding to concerns that lawmakers are attempting to resuscitate failed school choice policy in a teacher pay raise bill, House leaders said that’s not the case. 

Education policy has been center stage during this year’s legislative session, including expanding school choice policies that would send public dollars to private schools and raising educators’ pay for the first time in four years. 

But the two chambers have sparred over these issues. Earlier this session, the Senate killed the House’s private school choice proposal. The battle culminated last week when the House and Senate killed each others’ teacher pay raise bills.

However, the Mississippi House on Friday revived a pay raise for educators by entirely replacing another bill’s original language. According to budget analysts, the House proposal would cost the state $292 million a year.

The revised bill is almost identical to the House’s original teacher pay raise proposal. The omnibus package — the House’s favored approach to education policy this session — is hundreds of pages long and spans education topics. It would make changes to the Public Employees’ Retirement System, address chronic absenteeism in schools, give an array of school employees pay raises, incentivize retirees to return to the classroom and increase state per-student spending.

But to do so, the lengthy bill brings forward numerous parts of state law. That means those state laws could be amended if the Senate doesn’t kill the bill outright. 

The bill could put the Senate in a tight spot — if the chamber does kill the bill, that means it has killed the final viable teacher pay raise vehicle. 

But the revised bill would put all of those parts of state law back in play and could allow another attempt at expanding school choice for private schools.

Advocates pointed out those concerns last week. But House Education Committee Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville, told Mississippi Today that despite including language in the pay raise bill that would allow lawmakers to bring up school choice policy again, that’s not his intention. 

He said all of those code sections were his chamber’s effort at being thorough, not to serve as a Trojan horse for school choice. 

“School choice is not what we’re focused on, and if it were, I would tell you that’s what we were doing,” Roberson said. “This was not a situation where we were trying to play gotcha.”

Since the school choice debate heated up in the weeks leading up the session, advocates and educators have implored the state’s leaders to avoid a situation where lawmakers are forced to vote in favor of school choice to secure a teacher pay raise. 

Though Republican Gov. Tate Reeves said this week that school choice and teacher pay raises should be connected, House leaders, including White, have publicly said they believe it’s wrong to tie the two issues together.

Roberson was asked by members of his own chamber during a floor vote on the bill Friday whether or not the bill contained school choice policies, and he repeatedly and emphatically said that it did not. 

“I will continue to say, ‘No,’” he said Tuesday. “I do not want teacher pay and school choice to be associated with each other. It reeks of political hackery, and I don’t want that to be the way we approach this.”

As school choice and teacher pay raise talks between the two Republican-led chambers of the Legislature have stalled over the past two months, their relationship has disintegrated. That’s been made clear by press conferences hosted by White in which he’s lambasted Senate leadership, and by letters sent by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann in which he’s blamed the House for failed education policy. 

“You can’t send letters out saying that we killed everything … and then we turn right around and send you something that … you would like to have happened, and then you still don’t like it,” Roberson said. “I mean, it’s like arguing with my wife. I just don’t know what to make of it.”

The teacher pay raise bill has been sent to the Senate. The chamber has until March 26 to either approve the bill, decide to negotiate the terms of the bill or to do nothing and kill the bill.