LSU Manship School News Service

The House Education Committee voted to advance a bill to place state money into accounts that parents could use to send children to private schools. The committee also moved forward bills to confirm that teaching the Bible is legal and to make data about how public schools are spending their funds more easily available to the public.

Increasing violence in schools has prompted state lawmakers to propose the “Protect Teachers Act,” a bill that would grant protection from criminal liability to teachers who try to break up student-on-student violence.

Conversations in committee were heated... Glaze referred to a witness who owned men’s haircutting shops and supported the bill as “a dude who wants to put a bunch of little girls out of beauty school in tight shirts to do 15- minute haircuts. It’s wrong. Period.”

A bill that would ban classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation outside of school curriculum passed the House Committee on Education 7-5 on Wednesday. The proposal also would require transgender students to get a permission slip from their parents for teachers to use the pronouns matching their gender identity. And it enshrines in law that school employees do not have to use those pronouns “if doing so is contrary to the employee's religious or moral convictions.”