SB 243 - Tax Credit Scholarship - The Gods Are Out of the Closet

Our legislators were very busy yesterday cramming their favorite pieces of legislation through either the House or the Senate so the bill would live to see another day. One bill that survived "crossover day" was SB 243 - it doesn't really have a name but let me suggest several:

• Act to Empower Private Schools at the Expense of Public Schools
• Act to Pretend That Tax Credits are not Really Money Owed to the State
• Act to Offer Vouchers to Parents Who Choose Private Schools
• Act to Pretend that a Free Market Program Won't Attract Crooks
• Act to Pretend That the Sponsors Actually Care About Education
• Act to Get Around the Separation of Church and State

You may have heard of this program referred to as the Tax Credit Scholarship. Contributors can get a dollar for dollar tax credit against their Georgia state income tax liability for a contribution to a Student Scholarship Organization (SSO). The SSO then sends a portion of your "donation" to a private school. The portion retained by the SSO is of course inefficient and wasteful of tax payer dollars but essential for the proponents of the program to maintain the illusion that this is not a voucher program. We, the taxpayers, are not supposed to notice the waste.

We were also not supposed to be noticing that the majority of the private schools participating in the program are private religious schools. We were not supposed to bring up the fact that our state constitution specifically references the separation of church and state:

Section II, Paragraph VII. Separation of church and state. No money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, cult, or religious denomination or any sectarian institution.

Yesterday changed all that. The Gods are out of the closet in Georgia! Our legislators have decided to just toss the constitution aside. Who needs it right?

Here's what our State Senators approved in an amendment to SB 243 in reference to "eligible student" and who can waive the public school attendance requirement:

Lines 16-18: "or parents inform the public school in writing that they do not wish for their child to participate in classroom instruction or excercises that conflict with their religious beliefs."

Finally, our legislators are telling the truth. SB 243 was never about improving education for low-income students. It was never about education at all. In fact, it was never about kids. It's about adults, many of them lawyers who don't like separation of church and state.

Let the lawsuits begin.