After proponents of school vouchers picked up seats in this year’s Republican primaries, one local Democrat says it’s time for lawmakers to “come to the table” on an issue others in her party consider a non-starter.
State House Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins (D-San Antonio) serves on the Texas legislature’s select committee tasked with creating a school voucher program, which advanced such a bill for the first time in recent history last session.
Now that many of the GOP members who helped Democrats stop last year’s bill on the House floor have lost to pro-voucher primary challengers, Gervin-Hawkins wants Democrats to start thinking about shaping the policy, instead of just railing against it.
“I know that there are those people who are adamant against what they believe is the destruction of public schools,” she told the San Antonio Report.
” … If we address this in what I call an ‘adult manner’ … establish a framework where educating kids is our goal, but we’re not hurting one environment or the other, to me, that’s the approach we need to take,” she said. “It is time right now, to reimagine education as a whole.”
Gervin-Hawkins helped found a charter school in San Antonio, Gervin Academy, and has long supported using public money to create a more diverse landscape of options for parents and students — though she stops short of supporting school vouchers, which would allow taxpayer money to fund private school tuition.
But her comments are at odds with others in her party, including Democratic Caucus Leader Trey Martinez Fischer (D-San Antonio), who’ve made stopping school vouchers a key campaign message this year.
“Despite all of the changes that happened in the primary, if we’re able to pick up the seats that we’re expected to, I think it’s going to be a knife fight to defend public education next January,” Martinez Fischer told WFAA in June.
Gervin-Hawkins contends that public schools are suffering after last year’s fight left them empty handed. Despite the state’s $30 billion budget surplus, Gov. Greg Abbott held up the money lawmakers approved for them as leverage in his push for the creation of Education Savings Accounts — the latest iteration of school vouchers.
“Our public schools are saying right now that they have great needs,” Gervin-Hawkins said. “We don’t have any more time to keep kicking the can down the road and looking for headlines instead of making headway.”
Gervin-Hawkins ultimately joined fellow Democrats in stopping the ESA plan last session, but took heat from her party for suggesting they consider compromising.
“My position was, ‘What if, Plan B, vouchers occurred? What would happen?’ Well, no one wanted to talk about that [last session],'” she said.
“My hope is this session, we’re able to come to the table and have a rich conversation … because our kids and our schools are struggling right now,” she added. “They need us to make definitive decisions.”
At the same time, she said, an influx of conservatives who advanced from GOP primaries this year could shift the goalposts on the issue if Democrats are unwilling to negotiate.
“We’re going to be starting from ground zero,” Gervin-Hawkins said. “I think with the faces changed, it is going to change the discussion.”
Heading into the upcoming session, House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont), who has aligned with public school advocates in the past, faces new pressure from the right after narrowly surviving his own primary this year.
Gervin-Hawkins said she hasn’t heard anything about the future of her select committee, which statutorily expires at the end of the start of the next session. The House’s Public Education Committee is expected to meet next month to start preparing for the next session.
By being involved in those discussions, she said, there’s an opportunity to install guardrails to keep money from being siphoned off from public schools and to hold schools that receive ESA funding accountable to curriculum standards.
That’s critical, she added, because states that have already created ESA programs, like Arizona, started small but quickly grew them much larger.
“I believe everyone wants to same thing, and that is the best outcomes for our school-aged children. The issue is how do we get there?” Gervin-Hawkins said. “If there’s issues on either side, how do we mitigate those those issues — address those issues — so that we can at least move forward with something that creates a win-win.”
