A group of parents and progressive advocacy groups have filed a complaint against Tennessee over a recently passed universal school voucher law, claiming that it violates the state’s constitution.
Filed last week in the Chancery Court for Davidson County, Twentieth Judicial District, the lawsuit alleges that a new voucher law “is incompatible with its constitutional duty to provide an adequate education to all the state’s children through a single system of free public schools.”
In February, Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed the Universal Voucher Law, which created an education program making nearly all school-age students eligible for a $7,295 voucher.
“I learned a long time ago that education changes the trajectory of a child’s life forever,” Lee said back in February, in comments cited by The Tennessean. “Today we put in place a piece of legislation that will change the future of Tennessee forever, because it changes the trajectory of the next generation of Tennessee.”
The suit claims that the new law violates the Education Clause of the Tennessee Constitution by having the state “fund private schools outside the public school system” and by further reducing public school funding below adequate levels.
“If the program is permitted to stand, it will continue to drain funds from under-resourced public schools and send hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to unregulated private schools,” reads the complaint.
The groups representing the plaintiffs include the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the Education Law Center, the Southern Education Foundation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP.
“Tennessee’s Constitution is clear: the state must maintain and support a system of free public schools,” said Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Tennessee, in a statement provided to CP.
“This voucher scheme does the opposite,” he claimed. “It siphons desperately needed resources away from public schools that serve all students and hands that money to private schools with no accountability, no transparency, and no obligation to serve every child.”
The governor contends, however, that it will not draw support away from public schools, stating that the law “doesn’t change anything about the state’s obligation, as it currently stands, to educating children.”
Lee also said back in February that while there were “a lot of details to work out” on implementing the state law, “we already have an education savings account plan in place in this state for our three largest school districts, so we have some expertise within the department in how to implement this plan.”
