SALT LAKE CITY – In a stunning show of conservative clout, a pair of controversial bills moved at breakneck speed through Utah’s House and Senate during the first nine days of 2023’s 45-day session. 

And on Saturday, Jan. 28, Gov. Spencer Cox signed both measures into law, leaving many to ponder how – and what – just happened. 

While many questions remain, for now the only thing that seems certain is that House Bill 215 and Senate Bill 16 will likely spur lawsuits that impede their implementation.

Dizzying duo

In hindsight, the successful strategy to pass two such controversial bills so early in the session appears brilliant – and perhaps a bit devious in its seeming choreography. 

Treatment of gender dysphoria in minors came up for an interim committee hearing in October, hinting that such legislation was in the works. That measure got numbered as Senate Bill 16 in mid-December and its contents were made public Dec. 19. 

SB 16 bans transgender medical treatments and procedures for minors, deeming them too young to realize the ramifications of those actions. 

Proponents argued that it would protect children until adulthood when they could better make those weighty decisions. But opponents said the bill placed legislators in between children and their parents and doctors – possibly leading to more youth suicides.

The 2023 session launched Jan. 17 and on Jan. 18, SB 16 cleared its Senate committee hearing after significant public comment both for and against. And the next day, the measure passed its first required vote in the full Senate.

By Friday, Jan. 20, the Republican supermajority handed SB 16 its second Senate vote, with only one GOP senator joining Democrats to vote against it.

On Tuesday, Jan. 24, SB 16 cleared the House Education Committee hearing in an 11 to 3 vote, again along party lines.

By Thursday, Jan. 26, House Republicans – with the exception of two who didn’t vote and one who joined Democrats to vote no – voted in favor of SB 16, sending it on to the governor for his consideration. 

The movement of HB 215 —  to give teachers historic pay raises  while also funding scholarships for private schools and home-schooling – seemed even more rushed. 

HB 215 got numbered and publicly distributed on Jan. 16, one day before the session started. 

After a packed hearing by the House Education Committee on Jan. 19, members voted 12-4 to send it on to the full House, with only one Republican joining the Democratic minority to vote no.

On Friday, Jan. 20, HB 215 was debated in the House and passed 54 to 20, with six Republicans voting against it.

On Monday, Jan. 23, it cleared the Senate Education Committee on a 7-2 vote. By Thursday Jan. 26, HB 215 had cleared the full Senate in its second required vote. One Republican senator joined Democrats to vote against it, but the GOP still nabbed an easy win in that 20-8 vote.

On Saturday, Jan. 28, Gov. Spencer Cox signed both measures. 

The use of public ed dollars for different education choices harkened back to the voucher fight of 2007. 

That year lawmakers –  again with a Republican majority – passed a voucher bill, but voters countered with a citizen referendum in favor of public education funding remaining in the public school system. 

That ballot measure garnered 62 percent voter approval to overturn what legislators had recently done.

But 2023 is decidedly different. The GOP majority had expanded even further since 2007, and managed to secure two-thirds of the Legislative vote, giving HB 215 referendum-proof status and making direct democracy no longer an option.

What’s the hurry?

Asked about HB 215’s swift and early passage, House sponsor Candice Pierucci – now in her fourth general session as a legislator – said she’d worked on it for several months between sessions in response to her failed Hope Scholarship bill in 2022. That measure, HB 331, died in the House on a 22-53 vote.

“I opened a bill file May 4, which is the first day we can open a bill file for the upcoming session. And I prioritized it immediately,” Pierucci said in a recent interview. “We put in the work beforehand to make sure it was ready out of the gate.”

But with no public hearing by an interim subcommittee, most were in the dark concerning its contents. Pierucci said she had hoped its language could have been made public sooner that Jan. 16.

“There were glitches in the system or it would have been the week beforehand,” Pierucci said.

The contents of HB 215 drew from what other states had done, she added. 

“West Virginia, Florida, Arizona – those are states that have had school choice programs much longer than we have in Utah,” Pierucci said. “We really tried to come up with a model that checked what worked in those states and what would work best in Utah.”

She also noted that Utah is in no way “leading out on this.” Instead she believes it’s lagging behind.
“There are 25 states this year who are considering expanding or implementing really big school choice programs,” Pierucci said, crediting the Covid-19 pandemic for fueling that push.

And by getting big bills out of the way early in the session, Pierucci feels it could help minimize the mad rush at the end.

“I think both bodies last year had a lot of heavy bills – it was really hard to iron out good policy and you’re running up against the clock,” Pierucci said. “So I think both bodies made the decision to be proactive about what policies we voted on out of the gate.”

By email, Gov. Spencer Cox’s office responded that there had been no coordination between Cox and the Legislature to expedite HB 215 and SB 16 at the start of the session – and then get Cox’s signature shortly thereafter. 

Heritage Action for America, a conservative activist organization that boasts of two million members nationwide – including thousands in Utah – had been watching HB 215’a progress and issued the following statement as soon as it passed its final hurdle on Jan. 26:

“Heritage Action applauds the Utah State Legislature for their swift consideration and approval of HB 215. We look forward to Gov. Cox signing (it) into law and continuing the momentum for education freedom and parental rights in the Beehive State.”

But exactly how teacher raises got hitched to vouchers/scholarships  in the same bill remains unclear. But some speculate it could be ruled unconstitutional.

In her Jan. 24 blog post, Utah State Board of Education member Christina Boggess urged lawmakers to vote against HB 215 for a number of reasons, describing it as “poorly conceived, poorly written and … executed in the dark.”

Boggess objected to how the bill would regulate home and private schools, noting that HB 215  “grows government in unprecedented ways.” And by combining two distinct and separate subjects into one piece of legislation, she said it could likely be determined unconstitutional.

Before Gov. Cox signed HB 215, NAACP President Jeannetta Williams issued a statement urging him to veto the measure.

“Legislators are trying to say that this bill will help minorities and low-income families. This is not true at all,” Williams said. “It only benefits families who are looking at this bill to subsidize their incomes using tax funds to send their children to private schools.”

On Saturday (Jan. 28), Cox signed HB 215 and SB16. He also issued a statement praising both purposes achieved by Pierucci’s bill, saying it “strikes a good balance.”

“More than 90% of parents support Utah schools and so do we,” Cox said, adding that increasing teacher compensation was a top priority for his administration. “We commend the Legislature for supporting our teacher pay proposal which will help address the state’s teacher shortage and give Utah teachers the much-needed pay raise they deserve.” 

Deer in the headlights?

At least one major stakeholder – the Utah Education Association – struggled to keep pace with the well-orchestrated rollout of HB 215, which included robust rallies filled with students clad in matching T-shirts in support of school choice.

Some of those T-shirts were swag that came from Utah Fits All, an organized effort bearing the name of the new scholarship in HB 215. 

Their website listed a 10-member coalition: EdOpportunity Utah, Americans for Prosperity, Libertas Utah, Utah Taxpayers Association, Growing Unified Development, Private Schools Association, Path Forward Utah, Sutherland Institute, Strengthen Utah Families and Heritage Action for America.

The UEA has long been the strongest voice for Utah public school teachers representing about 18,000 educators and support personnel. 

Before the House Education Committee’s Jan. 19 hearing for HB 215, the association issued a statement detailing its opposition both to “strings attached” to teacher raises and also the impact of diverting public education dollars to home-schooling and private schools.

“The $8,000 scholarship is nearly double the current weighted pupil unit (WPU) value of $4,038 public school students receive,” the statement said, noting that HB 215 does nothing to address public education’s most pressing issues – large class sizes, post-pandemic student behavioral issues and severe staffing shortages.

UEA Pres. Renee Pinkney warned of the harm HB 215 could inflict during a Capitol rally on Jan. 23 – but by then the bill had already cleared several hurdles.

“UEA has a long-standing position that any voucher, tuition tax credit, or tax scholarship plan under which private education is subsidized with public tax dollars for affluent families along the Wasatch Front, at the expense of rural families with no access to private schools, will seriously undermine public education and student success,” Pinkney said.

In a recent phone interview, Pinkney acknowledged that she found it “quite startling” that teacher raises had been combined with vouchers into one bill.

“We had been hearing about it for a while, but we didn’t have bill language to look at. So we didn’t know what was in it,” Pinkney said.

But they did anticipate last year’s Hope Scholarship would be resurrected. What they didn’t expect was the speed at which HB 215 would travel through the process.

“Once it was numbered, it just moved like lightning through both the House and the Senate, and was signed this past Saturday (Jan. 28),” Pinkney said. “So It was just a really fast-moving piece of legislation.”

As far as Pinkney could tell, the two issues got coupled together after Gov. Cox released his budget recommendations in December.

“From there it just morphed into this bill with both teacher salaries and vouchers. There were multiple attempts to get them decoupled,” Pinkney said. “They were voted down.” 

However, there is a chance that the new referendum-proof law could be challenged and ruled unconstitutional.

“That constitutionality is still being explored,” Pinkney said. 

During a recent interview, Rep. Pierucci pushed back on the idea that HB 215 had been fast-tracked, noting that it received the required committee hearings and both chambers gave it full debate.

“So to say it was rushed – we went through the process and it wasn’t expedited,” Pierucci said. 

However, the House did suspend its 24-hour wait rule in this bill’s behalf on the first Friday of the 2023 session – a move generally reserved for the session’s final week when time is running out.

That rule aims to give lawmakers adequate time to read a bill’s contents before having to vote on it. In this case, the 56-page HB 215 siphons off $42.5 million annually in public education funding for scholarships that will boost homeschooling and private schools.

As a teacher who instructed students about government structure and how it’s supposed to work, Pinkney – just six months into her first term as UEA president – said this session has been eye-opening.

“Suspension of the rules was just one thing that you don’t realize how impactful that is. It enabled that legislation to move really fast,” Pinkney said. “There’s the theoretical and the actual. I’m learning.”