Gov. Tate Reeves on Tuesday said he would consider calling a special session on school choice and a teacher pay increase if legislators can’t come to an agreement over the next four weeks.
Republican House and Senate leaders have bickered over raising teacher pay and expanding school choice — policies that often allocate state funds to families to pay for private schooling — since the start of the legislative session in January.
Despite the discord, Reeves told reporters at a press conference Tuesday that both issues remain a priority for the Republican governor.
In fact, he said the two issues should be “tied together.”
“We should give teachers a pay raise, and we should also give parents and kids more options to give every child in our state an opportunity for success,” Reeves said.
But that’s a strategy House Speaker Jason White, who has led the school choice charge at the Capitol, has publicly opposed.
“No one in the legislature is tying school choice policy to a teacher pay raise,” White wrote on social media in December.
A major issue for a special session is the fact that school choice expansion failed in the Senate and barely passed the House. Even with White deeming it his No. 1 issue, many of his GOP caucus members voted against his school choice bill and it’s unclear whether he could keep a majority vote together even in a special session.
Reeves has never called a special session, which would suspend legislative deadlines and put more pressure on lawmakers, over a policy issue. He has only called lawmakers into a special session to deal with economic development projects and to pass a budget when legislators last year failed to agree on one.
However, he hinted that could change if lawmakers don’t reach a compromise on school choice soon, in part because of his lame-duck status.
“I don’t have much time left,” said Reeves, who is in the penultimate year of his second four-year term as governor. “And so on items that are incredibly important to me like rewarding our teachers, like getting more options for our kids — those are the kind of things that I am very, very interested in the Legislature getting across the finish line.”
Reeves said that it would be premature to make a decision yet, given the mercurial nature of the session. Just last week, the House revived a teacher pay raise bill, after House and Senate measures died.
“Nothing is dead in the Capitol until it is dead, dead, dead,” Reeves said. “We’re continuing to have good conversations with members from the House and the Senate, and we will continue to do so.”
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