Hopson helps kill ed funding changes
Published 6:36 pm Saturday, March 3, 2018
State Sen. Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, was one of eight Republican senators voting for a measure that killed a proposed change in the Mississippi Adequate Education Program funding formula.
The MAEP provides funding for education in grades K-12, and has been fully funded twice in the last 21 years.
House Bill 957, which was authored by Speaker of the House Philip Gunn, proposed to change the formula. The bill passed the house, but the Senate voted 27-21 to recommit it to committee. Since the deadline to return a bill to a committee had passed, the measure died.
Hopson voted to send the bill back to committee.
“It was bad for the district, No. 1, and I had some concerns about the part of the formula that affected career and technical education, and the allocation of dollars based on poverty,” Hopson said.
“There were some aspects I liked a lot in the proposed formula, but there were others that concerned me. I think the per student cost distribution was a better approach, but the details to the add-ons were a bit troubling; there’s a lot of issues with factors.”
State Rep. Kevin Ford, R-Vicksburg, who supports MAEP and was one of nine Republicans in the house to vote against the bill, said what happens next will depend on whether Gunn wants to reintroduce the bill. “That will be up to him,” he said.
State Rep. Oscar Denton, D-Vicksburg, who also supports MAEP, believes the bill will come back in the next session.
“We were going to have to do it anyway,” he said. “The way I understood it, the education bill wasn’t going to go into effect for two years, and we really would be using the same formula we have now.”
In other issues, Hopson said he has received comments from supporters and opponents of the proposed Safe School Bill, which would allow schools to arm teachers.
The bill is an amendment to a House bill that would allow people with concealed carry permits to sue if they were not allowed to carry their weapons on public property.
The bill would require an investigation into the complaint by the Attorney General’s Office.
Hopson said Safe School would strengthen an existing law that allows concealed carry weapons on school campuses.
“Schools can authorize enhanced carry holders to have weapons now, this just actually strengthens the requirements that somebody would have to have if they are able to have a weapon in school right now,” Hopson said. “I don’t understand why people are upset with it, because this makes it (the existing law) much stronger and difficult to be able to carry, where right now, the law would allow districts to allow employees to have enhanced carry permit weapons on campus. That’s been the law for a long time.”