Anderson Herald Bulletin
The so-called “divisive concepts” bill might finally be dead.
Indiana Senate leaders faced a Monday deadline to bring House Bill 1134 to the floor for amendments, and they failed to do that, effectively killing the measure for the current legislative session.
We hope.
The Indiana House and Senate now have two weeks to hash out disagreements in various conference committees about bills that have passed the two chambers in differing forms. Because the “divisive concepts” language passed the House 60-37, it could conceivably find new life in another education bill before the end of the session.
News of the bill’s possible demise came after hours of meetings by Senate Republicans behind closed doors.
Even though the party has a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly, Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray said the measure didn’t have enough support to pass.
Senate Republicans were largely divided into two camps. One camp thought the watered-down version of the bill approved by a Senate committee didn’t go far enough. The other camp thought it went too far.
The bill limiting what teachers could say in the classroom about race, sex and religion had drawn loud criticism from teachers, administrators, civil rights groups, Black community organizations and leaders of the faith community.
The bill had emerged from a nationwide movement of mostly white, suburban parents angry about what they believed their children were being taught in school. In its initial form, the bill had been aimed at giving parents greater access to teachers’ lesson plans and more power to oppose material they found troubling.
The measure passed the House last month mostly along party lines, but it had changed significantly in the Senate. The list of “divisive concepts” banned from classrooms had shrunk from eight to three, and provisions to allow parents to sue schools over things teachers said in the classroom had been eliminated.
Critics called the bill a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, and they warned it would make the state’s teacher shortage worse by driving qualified individuals out of the profession.
This was actually the second time such a bill had been killed in the Senate this session.
A similar bill died after one of its sponsors, Sen. Scott Baldwin of Noblesville, drew national outrage by saying the measure would require teachers to be neutral in their teaching on all topics, including Nazism, Marxism and fascism. He later walked back the remarks, but the damage was done. The bill never made it out of committee.
Monday’s news is worth celebrating, but it’s too soon to relax. This was a bad bill that never should have come this close to passage. It won’t be truly dead until the final bang of the gavel ending this session of the General Assembly.
Opponents must remain vigilant.
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