COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCSC) – In a turn of events some at the State House, including lawmakers, called “shocking,” a bill to restrict what can be taught in South Carolina classrooms won’t become law after all.
But supporters and opponents of the push both said this likely isn’t the last time South Carolinians hear about it.
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed the “South Carolina Transparency and Integrity in Education Act” by wide margins but with key differences between their versions.
To get it to the governor’s desk, they had to settle on a compromise and earn the support of two-thirds of their chambers.
That’s where things fell apart.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Richland, said. “It is a horrible bill. It is a bill — beginning of last year, we had 1,600 vacancies of teachers, and in a survey of teachers, most of them said they felt disrespected, they felt overwhelmed. This bill would’ve made it worse.”
Among its provisions, the bill would have banned teaching concepts including one race, sex, ethnicity, color, or national origin is inherently superior to another and that people are responsible for other actions committed in the past by members of their same race or sex.
The bill stated it would not ban the fact-based discussion or instruction of controversial aspects of history or current events or about the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, et cetera.
“Teachers are going, ‘That is an insult. You think we say that? You think we would do that?’” Jackson said of the concepts that would have been prohibited.
Democrats uniformly opposed the bill over concerns this could lead to censorship in the classroom and a chilling effect on teachers.
But Republicans argued it would have cleared up confusion on what is allowed in classrooms and what is not.
“I wish we could’ve done it this year to have gotten some clarity for parents and for educators, but it didn’t happen,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, said.
But the provision that caused the most heartburn was one from the House.
It would have allowed parents to sue school districts if they disagreed with what was being taught, despite having remedies in the bill to allow them to work out their differences before any lawsuit was filed.
“You gotta ask, what was the goal there? Because if the goal was about giving parents the ability to act on concerns, they already had it,” Patrick Kelly with the Palmetto State Teachers Association said. “So why do you need to sue a school district?”
Senators had removed this lawsuit language from the version of the bill they passed, but House members insisted it remains in some capacity.
An attempt to reach a compromise — by narrowing who could sue from any parent in any state, which was the original provision, to any parent of a student in a South Carolina public school district — opened the door for Democrats in the Senate to kill the bill.
Without at least some Democratic support in the upper chamber, the compromise failed to clear the threshold necessary to get it to the governor’s desk, so it died.
“It is solely this lawsuit power that blew up this bill,” Kelly said.
Members of both parties expect this bill will be refiled again next year when a new legislative session begins, and what it could look like is unknown.
All seats in the legislature are up for re-election this year, so there are guaranteed to be some new members in both chambers at the State House.
“I don’t know that what we talked about this year will be the same product next year,” Massey said.
Jackson also acknowledged that possibility but said Democrats were happy to delay what they view as harmful policy by at least a year.
“If we could turn a horrible bill into a bad bill, that’s good. If we could stop a bad bill from becoming law, that’s even better,” Jackson said. “And I think that is what happened.”
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