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Dan Patrick talks guns with Piers Morgan earlier this year.

In the first days of the legislative session, within a month of the mass school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst floated the idea of state-funded specialized gun training for teachers.

“Eight hours of instruction and two hours on the range is not sufficient,” he said at the time.

Today in the Senate Education Committee, lawmakers got a look at a bill to set Dewhurst’s troubled mind at ease, from Houston Republican Dan Patrick. The bill wouldn’t necessarily mean more teachers carrying guns in classrooms. (A House bill by freshman Dallas Republican Jason Villalba would handle that; another by James White would create a gun class for kids.)

Since Sandy Hook, a handful of Texas school districts have added policies letting some teachers carry guns—Patrick’s bill is meant to make that decision safer, so heat-packing teachers know what they’re getting into.

“If anybody other than police are carrying firearms,” Sen. Kel Seliger (R-Amarillo) said today, “and they do not have that scenario-based training, the school district is negligent.”

Under Patrick’s proposal, the Texas Department of Safety would develop a new gun skills class for protecting children when a shooter is on the loose. DPS would offer the class free to two teachers from any school that doesn’t have full-time security or police of its own.

There’s no course quite like that already, but DPS Director Steve McCraw was on hand to detail what it might look like: 16 hours of training, he said, in “being proactive defending the kids” and letting police know, when they finally arrive, that you’re not the shooter they should be worried about. Texas would be the first state to develop such a class, but McCraw said that what DPS has in mind isn’t some John Woo fantasy camp.

McCraw said DPS would develop a course with a “stand and defend” approach, not “active shooter training” on how to go after a gunman. It’d be ”consistent with” training plans developed by Texas State University’s School Safety Center, he said.

Senators’ biggest sticking point this afternoon was the price tag—$9.3 million over the next two years, according to the estimate in the fiscal note. Patrick, and other senators, said that estimate is probably way off-base because it assumes teachers from all 8,500 schools in the state would take the class. There are 180 districts with their own police forces, for instance, that wouldn’t even be eligible for the free training.

Seliger, though, said the price tag was “probably pretty close.” Fewer teachers might go for the training, but the class McCraw suggested would be twice as long as the fiscal note’s estimate. Seliger said he’s taken similar classes, and they’re expensive.

“This will not be done on the cheap, with civilians expected to participate in an armed scenario in a public school. I’m not opposed to it, but I don’t think we ought to be misleading anybody in terms of the rigor of the course.”

Royce West, a Dallas Democrat, had a more basic concern. Next to all the state’s other duties to pay for education—from teacher pay to test prep for struggling students—West wondered about spending millions on this new continuing education for teachers. ”What’s more important?” he asked.

“Saving the life of a child, if there’s a shooter in the school with an assault weapon, is more important,” Patrick shot back.

Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. (D-Brownsville) said he planned to offer an amendment to the bill, which would require the state to pay for the training “only if sufficient funds are available.”

“This amendment will potentially gut the bill,” Patrick said. He seemed to wonder, after all the favors he’d done as committee chair, what he’d done to deserve such a stab in the back.

“I’ve been very supportive of members on this committee, Senator Lucio, on programs that you have wanted. And if I had known that the decision was going to come down to a million or two for some programs that you wanted me to support—which i did—over protecting our students from a shooter…”

With Lucio and West interrupting him, Patrick trailed off. He left the bill pending in his committee, without any resolution on the bill’s price tag.

Voucher? Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. hardly even knows 'er.

Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) has been telling us to expect a school voucher bill since last summer. Since December, he’s been floating the idea as a “business tax credit scholarship“—letting companies divert money they’d pay in business taxes to a private school scholarship fund instead.

School groups lined up to fight the proposal. Some Republican leaders noted their distate for vouchers, too, and Paul Burka declared the scheme as good as dead. And still no voucher bill.

But Wednesday, from the Rio Grande Guardian, came word that a voucher “pilot program” could be introduced by—wait for it—Democratic state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. He just doesn’t want to call it “vouchers.” He told reporter Steve Taylor, at least twice, not to call it that:

The other bill would allow academically under-achieving students to leave their public school and received an education in a private school. A combination of taxpayer and private funding would help pay for their education but Lucio is keen to stress that the state funds would not come from the public education budget.

“The question is whether we are going to make a difference for those in need and those who are falling through the cracks. That is what my bills are really all about. It is not about taking away from public education funding. It is not about vouchers. It is more about helping a category of students who have fallen on hard times, who are disadvantaged economically and who need our help to make it through the system,” Lucio said.

[...]

“This will not be considered a voucher system. It will be set up in such a way that we do not use public education money. I do not want to see us being divided on this issue. It is just like feeding needy children, we do not really care where the money comes from. We just need to feed our children. It is the same thing with education.”

Lucio hasn’t filed a bill yet, but the plan as he describes it would be a lot like the business tax credits Patrick proposed last December. The Guardian explains that Lucio wants “a combination of taxpayer and private funding” for the program, which he figures would cost from $50 million to $100 million per biennium and pay for 10,000 to 20,000 students to attend private school.

“It’s still a voucher, because you’re still talking about diverting a funding stream out of [general revenue] that could have gone to funding public education,” says Monte Exter with the Association of Texas Professional Educators.

Exter notes that Lucio would go one step further than Patrick suggested last year, because his plan seems to include state spending up-front. It would take time, he says, to raise the tax credit money, so the state might have to start off paying for private tuition.

“What they’re doing is they’re creating a middle man, so instead of the state providing the money, they launder it through these tax credits,” says Texas Freedom Network spokesman Dan Quinn. “If you want to donate to send kids to a private school, you’re welcome to do that today. Getting a tax credit from the state makes it a publicly funded voucher program.”

If Lucio does introduce a tax credit program, Quinn figures he’d be the only Democrat backing it. “It’s a talking point more than it is a political advantage,” he says.

As in voucher fights past, Democrats and rural Republicans are still likely to oppose it. The vast majority of Texas’ public school districts don’t have any private schools in their boundaries that students could transfer to.

For what it’s worth, Lucio’s district has 27 private schools, according to the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. All but three are Christian schools, and half are branches of St. Mary’s School in Brownsville.