A Review of the 2026 Georgia Legislative Session

Lawmakers Made Some Attempts to Erode Public Education – We Held the Line and Built for the Future

Georgia lawmakers considered major proposals affecting public education during the 2026 legislative session, including school funding, property taxes, vouchers, charter schools, civil rights protections, school safety and college access. While some proposals advanced, advocates successfully blocked several measures that could have weakened public education and continued building support for equitable opportunities for Georgia students.

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(June 12, 2026) During the recent Georgia General Assembly, the IDRA worked with advocates and community members to protect public education and build a positive vision for Georgia students as the legislative calendar rolled into its second year.

Georgia’s legislature operates on a biennial schedule: the body meets twice over two years. Any legislation filed in the first year (2025) could carry over into the second year (2026) with the chance of becoming law. All legislation from this year that did not become law by April 2026 is finished and will have to start again at the beginning of the process with a new bill number in January 2027.

This review focuses on legislation that may have carried over from 2025 but was predominantly active in 2026. For more information on bills that carried over from last year to this year, you can read our 2025 legislative session wrap-up.

Here are some key legislative terms to remember:

• Amendment – A change or addition to a piece of legislation that must be supported by a simple majority of legislators either in a committee or on the floor of the chamber.
• Substitute – A different version of a bill, following an amendment to a bill.
• Vehicle – A bill that is amended to carry language from another bill. Combined bills typically must be “germane” to one another, which in Georgia is loosely defined as being from the same Title in the Official Code of Georgia.
• Stripped – A vehicle bill where the original language is completely removed and replaced with the language from another bill.
• Zombie – A bill that did not survive the crossover or committee process and is considered “dead” and is then substituted into a vehicle.
• Omnibus/Christmas Tree – A vehicle bill with language from several other pieces of legislation, sometimes used interchangeably with a vehicle/zombie.

*An asterisk signifies a bill IDRA supported

**A double asterisk signifies a bill IDRA did not support

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School Funding and Privatization Policies 

Funding the Future of Public Education

At about $19 billion, K-12 education spending makes up the largest percentage of the state budget. Even so, state funding has failed to keep up with students’ modern needs, increasing pressure on local communities in the form of property taxes.

Georgia’s education budget for 2027 reflects both historic investment and growing fiscal strain. While state leaders continued to tout record K-12 funding, Gov. Brian Kemp issued more than $300 million in line-item vetoes and budget “disregards” after signing the budget, citing concerns over a projected structural deficit tied to recent tax cuts.

Education programs were among the hardest hit, including roughly $30 million in reduced school transportation funding, cuts to school safety grants and the withholding of several one-time education initiatives. These actions underscore increasing tensions between state tax policy, rising education costs and the growing financial pressure placed on local school districts to sustain core services.

During the session, this tension played out in real time in budget negotiations and efforts to repeal income and property taxes statewide. While legislators sought ways to reduce property taxes on homeowners, public education advocates were concerned about the impact on schools, which rely almost exclusively on property taxes for revenue.

Original proposals would have rolled property taxes back over the next six years, with municipalities, including school districts, transitioning to reliance on more local sales tax options.

More than six versions of the property tax repeal legislation were put forward in the House and the Senate. Substantial property tax changes can only be made by a constitutional amendment, which requires a two-thirds majority of the body.

Ultimately, the Georgia House and Senate could not find enough common ground to pass the comprehensive legislation that was originally proposed. But both chambers agreed to a last-minute vehicle in Senate Bill 33 to mandate that all local municipalities cap their homestead taxes.

This means that school districts will have limits placed on how much they can increase homestead taxes each year. Homestead taxes are the primary source of locally controlled funding for most districts.

As state funding fails to keep pace with rising operational costs, the caps could further constrain school districts’ ability to respond to enrollment growth, inflation, staffing shortages, transportation costs and student service needs without additional state investment.

• HB 463** – Income Tax Cut (passed, with amendments)
• HR 1114** and HB 1116** – Full Property Tax Repeal (failed)
• SB 33** – Homestead Cap Mandate (passed as vehicle)
• HB 1135/SB 446** – Federal Voucher Opt-in (failed)
• HB 1164/SB 472** – School Board Financial Auditing and Oversight (passed)

Attempts to Expand School Privatization 

This legislative session featured an aggressive push to expand privatization in Georgia’s education system through charter school growth and private school voucher programs.

Legislators introduced proposals to increase access to Student Scholarship Organization (SSO) vouchers, broaden voucher eligibility, and extend additional public financing mechanisms to charter schools, including facilities funding traditionally unavailable to most neighborhood public schools.

While some of the most sweeping proposals stalled, lawmakers succeeded in expanding SSO vouchers and continued laying the groundwork for future privatization efforts. Even proposals that failed this session reflect a sustained political strategy to redirect public education dollars toward privately managed institutions with fewer transparency and accountability requirements than traditional public schools.

For public education advocates, these measures represent a continued erosion of the state’s commitment to fully funding and strengthening public schools that serve most of Georgia’s students.

Diverting public resources into voucher schemes and charter expansion risks deepening inequities, particularly for rural districts, high-poverty communities and students with the greatest educational needs, while weakening the financial stability of the public school systems most Georgia families rely on.

• HB 328** – SSO Voucher Expansion (passed, with amendments)
• HB 634** – Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Voucher Clean-Up (failed)
• SB 445** – Georgia Promise Scholarship Voucher Clean-Up (failed)
• SB 446** – Federal Voucher Opt-in (failed)
• SB 475** – Charter E-SPLOST: Education – Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) Consideration (failed)
• SB 498** – Charter Facilities Authority (failed)

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Culturally Sustaining, Rigorous Instruction in Classrooms

This session included a mix of proposals focused on academic rigor, civil rights protections and the role of public schools in maintaining inclusive learning environments. Together, these bills reflect competing priorities that shape how schools serve diverse student populations.

HB 1030, the Math Matters Act, which passed, emphasizes strengthening foundational math skills in early grades. Its implementation will determine whether the policy expands opportunity or reinforces existing barriers to students receiving high-quality instruction.

HB 1363 and SB 523 create a Title VI civil rights coordinator role at the state department of education and university system level, responsible for protecting students and families from discrimination based on race, color and national origin under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

These changes could help students and families navigate complaints related to harassment, unequal treatment, school discipline, language access and discriminatory school environments more effectively. Strong implementation could improve trust between schools and communities by creating clearer pathways for families to report concerns and seek support.

However, these protections will only be meaningful if the agency receives the resources necessary to support staffing, training and oversight to respond to complaints thoroughly and consistently.

• HB 1030 – Math Matters Act (passed)
• HB 1363* and SB 523* – Title VI Civil Rights Coordinators (passed, with amendments)

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Blurring the Line Between Church and School

During the session, we saw numerous bills filed to facilitate the encroachment of religion in public schools. Originally introduced as HB 133, this bill would have mandated that all public schools adopt policies on Religious Release Time Instruction (RTRI) courses, called “Release Time Courses” in the bill and defined as “courses in religious moral instruction provided by an individual or organization independently of a public school.”

These policies would have included mandatory excused absences to participate in these courses and an optional application of academic credit.

Lifewise Academy, the RTRI provider whose representative spoke at the Senate Education Committee on February 20 in favor of the bill, is an organization with the explicit goal of evangelizing to “unchurched” students in public schools and with a basis in a form of Christianity that villainizes LGBTQ+ people, abortion and divorce.

Before failing, the RTRI bill went through multiple iterations that would have disrupted local control, blurred the separation of church and state, caused disruptions to the school environment, and lacked sufficient guardrails to protect students and families.

In addition to creating a Title VI civil rights coordinator, SB 523 also creates a support system for students targeted by religious discrimination. This new support system can help students who face religious discrimination due to the favoring of one religion over others, as these religious encroachment bills intended to do.

Originally, the bill included a definition of antisemitism conflating anti-Israel speech with discrimination. But that clause was removed. The revised version strengthens the handling of claims of discrimination based on race or religion in schools.

• HB 133,** HB 451** and HB 1352** – Religious Release Time (failed)
• SB 523* – Title VI Civil Rights Coordinators (passed, with amendments)

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School Safety and Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Over the course of the biennial legislative session, Georgia leaders proposed measures that would impact the safety of Georgia’s students. Continuing the approaches championed by HB 268 in 2025, legislative leadership focused on surveillance and security technology instead of supportive interventions that can prevent school violence and make schools safer.

However, none of the major proposals in this area passed. We encourage policymakers to use the next biennial session to explore better options for school safety.

HB 1023 would have required every public school to have a weapons detection system at each main point of entry in the building. This approach would have cost local schools billions of dollars while promoting technology that has not been shown to be effective at preventing school violence. The bill was passed by the Senate Public Safety Committee and the House, but it did not receive a final vote on the floor of the Senate.

Another bill, SB 497, would have required parents to be notified when a student receives medical or therapeutic services from their school and would have made these services part of students’ permanent education record. This bill presented a clear potential for violating children’s rights to medical privacy, which are protected by a significant threshold, as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This, in turn, raised concerns of a chilling effect for students using these services, which are known to make schools safer. This bill passed out of the Senate but did not make it out of the House Education committee.

Finally, SB 513, which would have incorporated punitive measures to enforce 2025 legislation to reduce chronic absenteeism. The bill would have prevented students who were deemed “chronically unexcused absent” from participating in extracurricular activities and ultimately make them ineligible from receiving a driver’s license.

Students in IDRA’s Civic Changemakers program highlighted how the bill left the thresholds for these penalties vague and subjective, which could lead to disparate impacts even within school districts. In addition to its punitive nature, students scrutinized the bill for its disproportionate potential for harm to students in rural communities compared to urban and metro schools, as rural students are much more likely to have a driver’s license than metro students. This bill was one of many casualties on the floor of the House and died in a vote of 90 No’s to 80 Yes’s.

• HB 1023** – Metal Detector Mandate (failed)
• SB 497** – Student Records Expansion (failed)
• SB 513** – Chronic Absenteeism (Driver’s License Penalty) (failed)

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Higher Education Access and Preparation

This session included targeted efforts to expand pathways to college. But several proposals raised concerns about a shift away from established, evidence-based measures of college readiness. Rather than strengthening alignment with widely validated, norm-referenced benchmarks, some legislation proposed to move toward alternative standards with less demonstrated reliability and comparability.

HB 1064, for example, would have introduced the Classical Learning Test as an admissions option alongside more established assessments like the SAT and ACT. While positioned as increasing flexibility, this bill represented a departure from assessments with decades of psychometric validation, large national norming samples and well-documented predictive value for college success.

Expanding the use of less-validated alternatives risks undermining consistency in admissions decisions and complicates efforts to ensure equitable evaluation across students from different educational backgrounds.

At the same time, SB 556 aimed to broaden access to college-level coursework and financial supports by extending HOPE credit eligibility to Advanced Placement fine arts classes and expanding DREAM funding, a need-based financial aid program designed to help low-income Georgia students afford college tuition and related college costs.

While the bill reflects a more inclusive approach to academic preparation, it operates within a broader policy context where the standards used to define “college readiness” may be becoming less uniform.

Taken together, these measures suggest a mixed legislative approach: modest steps to expand access to rigorous coursework and aid, paired with more consequential shifts that may weaken the consistency and evidence base that underlie how students are evaluated for college entry.

Relevant Bills

• HB 1064** – Classical Learning Test for Georgia Universities (failed)
• SB 556* – AP Fine Arts HOPE Credit (& DREAM Funding) (passed)

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Looking Ahead

Despite an increasingly challenging legislative environment, this session demonstrated the growing strength, coordination and persistence of Georgia’s public education advocates.

Through coalition organizing, student testimony and rapid-response advocacy, partners across the Georgia Coalition for Education Justice (GCEJ) helped stop some of the most harmful anti-public education legislation, while elevating a positive vision for safe, welcoming, fully-funded public schools.

Looking ahead, our work continues. As many of these proposals are likely to return in future sessions, we remain committed to deepening our coalition, supporting youth leadership, strengthening community power and advancing policies that ensure every Georgia student has access to a high-quality public education.

We are thankful for our partners, students and community members for showing up to the Capitol to advocate for their school community.

A special thanks to our intrepid Georgia team: Mikayla Arciaga, M.A.Ed., Terrence Wilson, J.D., Makiah Lyons, J.D., and Isabelle Philip.

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To learn more about our policy agenda, subscribe for alerts or contact IDRA’s Georgia Advocacy Director, Mikayla Arciaga, M.A.Ed.

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FAQs

What were the major education issues in the 2026 Georgia legislative session?

The session included debates over school funding, property taxes, vouchers, charter schools, civil rights protections, school safety and college access.

Did Georgia expand private school vouchers in 2026?

Lawmakers approved expansion of Student Scholarship Organization vouchers, while several other voucher-related proposals did not pass.

What happened to Georgia school funding proposals?

Lawmakers adopted a statewide homestead tax cap, which may limit local school districts’ ability to raise revenue as education costs increase.

What civil rights legislation passed in 2026?

Georgia approved legislation creating Title VI civil rights coordinator positions to help students and families address discrimination complaints.

Which education proposals did not pass?

Several proposals failed, including legislation related to full property tax repeal, federal voucher opt-ins, religious release time mandates, metal detector requirements and driver’s license penalties tied to absenteeism.

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