Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi legislators have voted to keep a school voucher program alive for another four years, sending a bill to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.

Senate Bill 2954 would reauthorize a program for educational scholarship accounts, with some changes. The accounts allow special-needs students to receive $6,500 a year in public money to attend private schools.

The current program was established in 2015 and is set to expire at the end of June.

The Senate voted earlier this year to keep the program alive, and the House agreed to the bill Friday. Reeves supported the program as lieutenant governor last term, and he steered an extra $2 million into it last year as he was running for governor.

The bill awaiting his consideration would set new limits on the program by requiring that the money could only be used in schools that provide services a student needs. It also would eliminate the use of vouchers for out-of-state or online schools.

Grant Callen is president of Empower Mississippi, a group that has pushed to keep the program alive.

“While we celebrate this victory, we are disappointed for the children who will have their lives upended because schools that were meeting their needs are no longer eligible," Callen said in a statement Friday.

The Parents' Campaign, a group that lobbies for public schools, has opposed the voucher program. The group's executive director, Nancy Loome, wrote in an email this week that the bill “takes important steps to limit this horribly flawed voucher program that takes scarce tax dollars away from public schools to pay tuition at private schools.”

Almost half the students in the program have come from five urban school districts — Rankin County, Madison County, DeSoto County, Jackson and Hinds County. People who would like to use the money have had problems finding schools in rural areas.