COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Senate made some key changes to a bill that aims to limit what teachers can say in school about controversial topics. One of those topics includes race.
The bill states, among other things, there needs to be fact-based discussion of history. It wouldn’t allow discussions that said one race is superior to another or people of one race are responsible for past atrocities.
A Senate committee stripped most of what the House requested and added new information this week. State Senator Shane Massey said the top priority was objective teaching.
“Basically, what we did is we dropped back to the version that came out the House committee and then we took up each one of the amendments the House adopted on the floor, and we adopted some of those and there were a couple that we pulled out," Massey said.
Originally, the House approved a version that would let a parent sue any teacher for the content taught in the classroom. But Senator Brad Hutto said the Senate removed this amendment.
“We want no part of that. We applaud the work teachers do. We want them to have the opportunity to teach appropriate historic facts in the classroom," Hutto said.
The revised version of the bill has more bi-partisan support.
Kathy Maness with the Palmetto Teachers Association says there’s a clear outline of what that means for teachers.
“Slavery, the holocaust, Jim Crow ... that’s not history we want to be proud of but it happened, and our students need to know about that," Maness said.
And if parents have concerns, the Senate created a process for that.
“There’s a process that has to be laid out as far as the district flowing through to investigate the complaints," Sen. Massey said.
That process would play out at the local level with the state just providing guidelines.
Maness says this new bill lifts a burden, "So that teachers can teach and students can learn."
The new version of the bill is now set to go to the full Senate. However, the House would also have to approve these changes.