Open enrollment is the first education bill considered this year by Missouri House

By Annelise Hanshaw

Missouri Independent

A proposal to allow Missouri’s public school districts to open their boundaries is back this legislative session as the first education bill to get a hearing in the state House.

The House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education opened its first hearing of the year by considering Sedalia Republican Rep. Brad Pollitt’s open enrollment bill.

“This bill allows the 899,000 students in the state of Missouri in the public school system the opportunity to have choice within the very system that their parents pay taxes to,” Pollitt told committee members.

He told The Independent at the close of last year’s session that there was a plan in place to pass his bill through the Senate, latching it to state Rep. Ed Lewis’s bill on teacher recruitment and retention.

But in a fit of filibusters in the session’s closing days, the bills never made it to the full Senate for debate.

Pollitt wrote what he calls a “compromise” into the bill, capping the number of transfers annually at 1% of the student population in districts with a high number of free-and-reduced-lunch students. He thought this would help it pass the Senate, but he told the committee on Wednesday that policy leaders in the Republican caucus recommended removing the provision.

Otto Fajen, lobbyist for the Missouri branch of the teachers union National Education Association, said removing the compromise language caused him to oppose the bill. Otherwise, the association would have a more neutral stance.

“Because the committee is now poised to remove any protection against resegregation… you need to be thoughtful about that,” Fajen said. “You need to have some kind of break if you start to see things going in the wrong direction.”