Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.Tennessee will expand its universal voucher program to 35,000 students next school year despite bipartisan opposition to the program over its growing price tag and changes to the funding assurances made to public school districts last year. A slim majority of Tennessee Senate Republicans signed off on the legislation on Thursday. The bill will go to Gov. Bill Lee to be signed into law. While the Senate initially sought to expand the program to 40,000 seats, the chamber agreed to move forward with a House version for 35,000 students.Last year, Lee pushed lawmakers to pass his signature voucher program, and lawmakers included an annual growth cap of 5,000 seats and a “hold harmless” clause that would maintain public school funding if local districts lose students. That clause was pivotal in passing the Education Freedom Scholarships program in 2025 because it reassured lawmakers concerned about their local school districts. Now, both of those provisions have been significantly altered.Republican lawmakers eager to begin tracking immigrant students in Tennessee public schools also added a last-minute amendment that would require public schools to collect student Social Security numbers to maintain their hold harmless funding over the next several years. Schools cannot legally require students to provide their Social Security numbers, and some lawmakers argued the measure is an effort to phase out the hold harmless funding more quickly. “The term for that is bait and switch. And we’re in the switch part,” Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat, said Thursday. “We need to do what’s right for our districts. We need to be responsible. We should not be doing this to create administrative burdens, divert resources, and expand a program that on its best day helps about 1% of families. Families, frankly, that need less help.”Senators voted 18-14 on Thursday to pass the program, a smaller majority than what supported the original EFS passage in 2025. “The people depend on us doing what we say we’re going to do,” said Sen. Joey Hensley, a Hohenwald Republican who voted for the program last year but voted against the expansion.Majority Leader Jack Johnson, a Republican from Franklin sponsoring the legislation, pointed to interest in the Education Freedom Scholarships program as the reason to expand it. More than 54,000 students have applied for the 2026-27 voucher, which will be worth more than $7,500 for private school tuition and other educational expenses. Sen. Adam Lowe, a Republican from Calhoun, said spending on the program is a “small fraction” of overall public funding going towards education in Tennessee. Around $7.9 billion is earmarked in next year’s budget for overall funding for public schools, which serves around 1 million students. “At the back end of it are real families looking for alternatives that, despite the investments we provided for public education, we’ve yet to be able to provide for them,” Lowe said. “It’s unreasonable for us to continue to expect public education to be everything to everybody.”Sen. Richard Briggs, a Republican from Knoxville, argued against the program on Thursday. Briggs indicated the arguments for the program have shifted over time, from initial pushes that emphasized failing public schools and children in the poorest neighborhoods.Now, Briggs said, two-thirds of the money in the program has gone to the six wealthiest counties in the state.Briggs also criticized Lee’s administration for the lack of transparency around the program, particularly regarding data on how many children have exited failing public schools or any public schools to attend private schools. “I don’t know what the numbers are because, quite frankly, the numbers have not been available. If anything, they have been concealed by the administration,” Briggs said. Briggs said he was concerned Tennessee may “have a day of reckoning” with the state budget eventually that might cause the state to retract the program in future years. Tennessee education officials will be required to be more transparent about the program in future years, including collecting more household income data on families and tracking how many new vouchers go to public school students. Some House lawmakers pushed to include more data reporting requirements after the Tennessee Department of Education and governor’s office balked at tracking certain student data, such as how many initial vouchers benefits public schools students and students already enrolled in private schools. Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.
