(The Center Square) – A bill that would double Tennessee’s Education Freedom Scholarships was moved to the Senate floor calendar on Tuesday.
Senate Bill 2247 creates an additional 15,000 scholarships. The law passed by the General Assembly in a 2025 special session, creating the initial 20,000 scholarships, automatically allowing an additional 5,000.
If the bill passes, the number of $7,530 scholarships available to 40,000 students for the 2026-27 school year. Second-term Republican Gov. Bill Lee proposed more than $300 million for the scholarships in his fiscal year 2027 budget proposal.
Passage was 6-4 by the panel, with Republicans Tim Hensley of Hohenwald and Page Walley of Savannah joining Democrats Lamar London of Memphis and Jeff Yarbro of Nashville in voting no.
Hensley asked why the money allotted to each student under the state’s school funding formula, known as the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement or TISA, is not used.
“If they’re receiving education scholarships, why do we have to designate extra money in the budget to pay for those?” Hensley asked. “That’s over $300 million going forward, that’s outside the TISA formula.”
Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Franklin said the money is not directly tied to a student.
“If students leave a public education setting and go to a private school, then we will not be appropriating that money, so it will come back effectively to the state,” Johnson said.
“It just seems like we’re paying for some of these children twice,” Hensley said.
Lee and supporters of the expansion cited the program’s popularity as a reason to increase the scholarships.
More than 56,000 students applied for the 2026-27 school year, while more than 38,000 applied for the 2025-26 school year, according to the Tennessee Department of Education.
“It’s unsurprising that people are accepting this scholarship because we’re subsidizing existing behavior,” Yarbro said. “More than 90% of the students were already attending private schools in the first place.”
A House amendment would reduce the expansion by 5,000 to 35,000. The details are still being worked out, a speaker for House Republicans told The Center Square. The House version of the bill will be considered by a subcommittee of the House Finance, Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday.
