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Request a DemoUpdate, May 10, 2023: After much negotiation the Legislature voted to fully fund HOPE scholarships, as the governor had requested. HB 249, which increases the total amount of need-based college completion grants to $3,500 from $2,500, was also passed in both chambers, but was vetoed by Gov. Brian Kemp in May. HB 310 did not advance in the House, but a similar bill, HB 607, which lowers the ACT score required for a Zell Miller Scholarship, did pass and was signed by the governor.
ATLANTA — When Gov. Brian Kemp announced last month that he planned to fully fund the HOPE Scholarship in fiscal year 2024 with a $61.5 million increase to the state budget, Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Atlanta, was among those in the Legislature loudly cheering.
Evans has been lobbying for over a decade to expand HOPE (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally), aiming to steer the program back toward its origins: a state lottery-funded program designed to make college affordable for Georgia residents.
“I am thrilled about the direction we’re going, and truly grateful to see these funds restored,” she said. “But there is more we need to do for our students to be able to make it through college going forward.”
While Kemp’s promise to fully fund the HOPE Scholarship has been met with wide bipartisan support, the governor’s proposal only fully funds the program for one year — from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024. The funding will mean an extra $444 per year, on average, for full-time students.
As the Georgia Lottery-fed education reserve fund swells to $1.9 billion and college enrollment continues to drop, legislators, education advocates, workforce development experts and families have expressed concern that seemingly fewer students from low-income families as well as Black and Hispanic children are being awarded scholarships.
In fiscal year 2022, the Georgia Student Finance Commission (GSFC) awarded close to a billion dollars — $945 million — to Georgia students, to fund five main programs: $472 million for HOPE Scholarships, $300 million for Zell Miller Scholarships, $23 million in HOPE Grants, $14 million in HOPE Career Grants and $13 million in Zell Miller Grants. GSFC also doled out $26 million in student loans.
But somewhere along the way, critics say, the HOPE program became a two-tiered scholarship award, evolving in ways that significantly affect who gets access to college funds.
HOPE began in 1993 with the creation of a statewide lottery to fund pre-K and higher education programs. It had a simple premise: earn at least a B average in high school, maintain that in college, and if you’re a Georgia resident, your college tuition, fees and books are covered. It was aimed at families of modest to middle class means, with a family income cap of $66,000. That cap was lifted in 1995, drawing applicants from all economic levels, who began snapping up the scholarships.
A key inflection point in the program came in 2011, when post-recession economic pressures — lower lottery revenues, higher college costs and an increased demand for scholarships — threatened to deplete the lottery reserve. In response, legislators enacted new academic requirements for the scholarship and created a new, full-tuition program known as the Zell Miller Scholarship.
The Zell Miller required a 3.5 high school GPA, a minimum number of academically rigorous courses and a 1200 SAT (or 26 ACT) score. The bar to receive a HOPE Scholarship still included a 3.0 high school and college GPA, but would only cover a portion of tuition (ranging from 80% to 90% in recent years). Books and fees were no longer covered by any of the scholarship programs.
Since its creation, Zell Miller Scholarship recipients have been pulling an increasingly larger piece of the HOPE pie, and fewer funds are now going to Black and Hispanic students from low-and middle-income families.
A 2021 study by the Georgia State University (GSU) Child & Family Policy Lab showed that white students are six times more likely than Black students to enter a USG school with a Zell Miller Scholarship. Students from families with low incomes and federal Pell Grant recipients are significantly less likely to gain and more likely to lose both Zell Miller and HOPE scholarships.
While 83% of students from households with annual incomes above $100,000 enter Georgia colleges with a HOPE or Zell Miller scholarship, only 54% of students with a family income of $30,000 or less enter college with one.
“The irony, of course, is that low-income people in Georgia are disproportionately funding the HOPE scholarships through purchase of lottery tickets,” said Ross Rubenstein, a professor of education and community policy at GSU and a co-author of the study.
“When we looked at who plays the lottery and how much they spend relative to who gets benefits from lottery-funded programs — if it’s a merit-based college scholarship program, of course it’s going to be skewed towards middle- and upper-income households. We found that lower-income households were spending a higher share of their income and on average spending more money on an absolute basis on the lottery,” said Rubenstein. “So you have where the money is coming from, and where it’s going, and it’s a very regressive way to raise revenue.”
At Maynard Jackson High School (MJHS), counselor Sakari Balam is on a team of five who support 1,450 students from a diverse array of socioeconomic backgrounds — “the haves, the have nots and the in-betweens,” said Balam. They work with students beginning in ninth grade to help them identify their college and career interests, introducing students to the Georgia Futures website, the portal through which financial aid forms, transcripts, Common App essays and college dreams flow.
The saving grace for many students who are “on the cusp, with a 2.9, or maybe a 2.5,” said Balam, is that “they can get money from Achieve Atlanta,” a nonprofit that provides need-based scholarships to low-income, predominantly Black and Latino students in Atlanta each year. Awards range from $1,500 to $5,000 and require a 2.5 GPA.
“I don’t know what other school districts are doing, you know, in helping these kids to close that gap, because I can’t imagine not having something like this in place, in addition to the various scholarships and businesses that we’re always trying to connect them with,” said Balam.
Despite their best efforts, some students do fall through the cracks.
Alayna Blash is a parent of a sophomore at Maynard Jackson and the president of the MJHS Go Team, which includes parents, teachers and community members. In 2018, her son Niles was a senior at the school, and struggling to secure financial aid with a 2.9 “HOPE GPA” (a GPA calculation that factors in “rigor” courses like advanced science, math, AP English and foreign languages, which are weighted more heavily than other basic courses).
“He just missed out on the HOPE Scholarship, and we didn’t know about a lot of other help he could have gotten,” said Blash, who said she found navigating the Georgia Futures portal and the whole financial aid process “bewildering” at the time, despite the fact that she works at Spelman College as associate director of student success.
Niles ended up going to Clark Atlanta University, a historically black, private college where tuition and fees are $12,000 per year, thanks to a tuition credit available through his mother’s job affiliation with the Atlanta University Center. Niles got a small HOPE grant that was “just enough to cover his books” each semester, Blash said. And he’s living at home until he graduates this year because they can’t afford for him to live on campus.
Blash said she’s better prepared now to help her son Marcus, who’s a good student and an athlete, to get a stronger aid package. But she worries about other Black students at Maynard Jackson and other Atlanta Public Schools.
“You know, my concern is always equity,” said Blash. “And if I just think about the eligibility requirements for HOPE, and who at my school [is] in those rigor courses, we know we have a gap there. There’s a disparity. And that’s something that our principal and the team are working on. Because if our Black students are not in the courses, then no, they’re not getting HOPE. And I do think the state should use the lottery money to expand HOPE to meet the need that programs like Achieve Atlanta are meeting because there’s a tremendous need among students who aren’t going to get that 3.0.”
In an effort to level the playing field for students, Rep. Evans, who sits on the House Higher Education committee, is co-sponsoring with Rep. David Wilkerson, D-Powder Springs, House Bill 310, which gets rid of the SAT/ACT score requirement for Zell Miller scholarships. And Evans’ bill HB 157 repeals the Zell Miller grant program altogether.
Evans noted that many students who don’t qualify for a Zell Miller Scholarship have 3.5 or better GPAs, but don’t have high enough standardized test scores, “which is not necessarily the best indicator of college success. It certainly wasn’t for me. I had a 3.8 GPA but barely a 1000 on the SAT. Under HOPE as it exists today, I would not qualify,” she said.
“So many people in the majority just can’t get past wanting to insert some sort of merit element into financial aid,” said Evans. “It’s frustrating. There are a lot of C students in Georgia, and a lot of colleges in Georgia that accept them. I don’t know why we don’t want to help them.”
Evans also introduced HB 316 last week which would mandate (by law, and not just per the 2024 budget) that HOPE grants, which fund diploma and certificate (but not degree) programs, cover the full cost of tuition for an academic year. In recent years the grants only partially funded tuition. And HB 157 calls for HOPE grants to start covering tuition for two-year associate degree programs at technical schools, a change the state Office of Budget and Planning estimates would cost $25 million in 2024.
A call for need-based scholarships
Many people in Georgia have been calling for years for the state to add more need-based college funding into the mix of merit-based financial aid available. Georgia is currently one of only two states in the country that does not have a comprehensive need-based scholarship program.
“We are absolutely missing the mark with our deep love relationship with the HOPE Scholarship and the lack of need-based aid,” said Ashley Young, an education policy analyst with the liberal Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI). While Georgia’s HOPE program is fourth in the nation in the total amount of scholarship money it gives to students “and that’s something to be proud of, that does not make it an equitable system,” she said. The HOPE program has awarded $13.7 billion to 2.1 million students since 1993.
“The HOPE Scholarships largely benefit students who were already on track to attend college,” said Young. “Whether they are second- or third-generation college student status, or already in a place to financially afford college, they have an advantage. When we invest more in merit-based scholarships, we invest for certain students to have options. It’s like, ‘So do I want to go to GSU versus Georgia Southern versus West Georgia?’ Need-based aid is about access, and determines whether someone can afford to attend college at all.”
A survey by GBPI in 2020 found that 75% of Georgians support a need-based college financial aid program
Kayla Daniel, 21, is among those students from a low-income family who are stretched to afford college. A student at Gwinnett Technical College in Lawrenceville, she’s studying to be a respiratory therapist, in a two-year degree program. She recently transferred from a four-year nursing program at nearby Georgia Gwinnett College (GCC) to cut costs. Though she had a federal Pell Grant and a HOPE Scholarship at GCC, and lives with her parents to save on room and board, she said the $13,000 annual cost was too much for her and her family to cover.
The tuition at Gwinnett Tech is less expensive — $1,850 per semester, plus $300 for used books and about $200 a month for gas to commute from her home in Loganville, 45 minutes away. Though she worked through the holidays full-time at Macy’s, she said she doesn’t have time for a job now.
“I knew that once I got into this program, I really wouldn’t have time to work,” said Daniel. “All my time goes into studying, and we have two or three tests every week. I don’t have time to be working on some job when this is supposed to be my future.”
Despite the college credits and 3.5 GPA she came in with, Daniel said she hasn’t yet qualified for a HOPE Scholarship at Gwinnett Tech and has taken out a $4,000 student loan for this school year, debt added to the $1,900 she already has on a credit card she uses solely for school expenses. Daniel said she’s worried about the mounting interest but is determined to get her degree next year and join the workforce where her skills are in high demand.
Her classmate Yancka Denis, 26, is in a similar situation, pursuing a respiratory therapy degree while carrying about $20,000 in student loan debt after transferring from a private nursing college. She lives with her aunt nearby, paying $600 a month in utility and cable bills, and $300 a month on a car loan. She works on weekends at an assisted living facility, tending to elderly patients with memory loss.
“It’s a lot to juggle, and I do get tired sometimes,” said Denis. “But I know I have good job prospects at the end of all this.”
Targeting high-demand career tracks with more lottery funding
What often goes along with faltering tuition and debt payments is a failure to graduate, a tragic outcome for any student, and particularly those who began their college careers with HOPE scholarships.
According to the GSU study of merit-based scholarships, more than 120,000 students will start a bachelor’s degree program in Georgia with a HOPE or Zell Miller scholarship. Twenty percent of students who enter with Zell Miller Scholarships will drop to HOPE or lose their scholarship altogether, and 30% of students entering with HOPE Scholarships will lose them. Most often it’s due to not maintaining the required GPA.
“We continue to see a really large percentage of our graduating students with relatively large amounts of college debt,” said Dana Rickman, CEO of Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, a nonpartisan, nonprofit focused on student achievement and workforce development. “And it’s important to remember there’s a significant portion of students who accumulated a bunch of debt, and then had to drop out, especially among the population who were able to start with a [HOPE] scholarship but lost it.”
The Institute for College Access & Success reports that the average debt load of a college graduate in Georgia in 2020 was $28,000, the third highest in the U.S.
Rep. Chuck Martin, R-Alpharetta, who chairs the House higher education committee, said he’s keenly aware of the loan burdens that many students carry, as well as the state’s shortage of skilled and educated workers.
According to Complete College Georgia (CCG), a USG program, by 2025, more than 60% of jobs in Georgia will require some form of post-secondary education, including bachelor’s and associate degrees, and a variety of industry certifications. But CCG reports that only 48% of the state’s young adults currently hold such credentials.
And the headwinds pushing against the state’s ability to achieve that goal are represented in another reality: college freshmen enrollment in Georgia has fallen by about 7% since 2020. The USG system expects fewer Georgia high school graduates over time due to lower birth rates.
To help financially stressed students stick it out, Martin is sponsoring HB 249, which would make one-time, need-based completion grants of up to $2500 available to students who run out of money after they’ve completed 70% of credits in a four-year program, and 45% of credits in a two-year program. Currently, these grants are funded at $10 million in the governor’s proposed 2024 budget. Martin said he’d like to fatten the completion grant fund by transferring capital out of the student loan program, currently funded at $26 million, “to help more students cross the finish line and avoid taking on more debt.”
When asked by State Affairs about his and the higher education committee’s willingness to use more lottery funds to pull more students who don’t qualify for merit-based HOPE programs into college and career pipelines, Martin said, “There is a sincere effort going on in the workforce subcommittee and higher ed to move the needle on this. We’ve talked about this for a long time, and then COVID happened. As Newt Gingrich used to say, ‘Real change requires real change.’
“We’re looking at applying additional monies toward incentivizing people to finish their education in programs that are most productive,” he said. “It’s probably going to be focused on certain high-demand careers in TCSG and certain fields in USG. There’s just not enough capital to do it for everybody. And frankly giving college tuition to every person that wants to go to college, you’re going to have people that don’t have a focus, and may go into debt with no reward, which isn’t good for them or for the state. But hopefully, we’ll get some more people headed to college and TCSG programs in 2023, and then we’ll come back and look at doing more, incrementally.”
GBPI’s Young said the education lottery reserve fund “has grown tremendously since 2015,” and now stands at $1.9 billion. About $770 million is required in case of a shortfall to be able to fund HOPE programs, she noted, leaving $1.1 billion in unrestricted reserves.
“If we tap the lottery reserve for need-based aid, I understand that there are valid concerns about how that would be sustained,” she said. “It depends on how you determine eligibility for students, how much money we’re giving out each year, and other factors. But I think it is certainly an embarrassment of riches to have this much money and still no broad need-based aid program.”
Have thoughts on how lottery proceeds or other state education funds should be spent or managed? Contact Jill Jordan Sieder on Twitter @JOURNALISTAJILL or at [email protected].
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Header Image: Gwinnett Technical College students Kayla Daniel and Yancka Denis are both studying to be respiratory therapists. (Credit: Jill Jordan Sieder).
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Democratic incumbents vie for redrawn House district seat
ATLANTA — Democratic incumbents running in south DeKalb County’s newly drawn District 90 are in a political predicament: Longtime comrades, they now find themselves pitted against each other.
Reps. Saira Draper and Becky Evans met Wednesday on the debate stage at St. John’s Lutheran Church to make the case for why voters should choose them for the newly drawn district in the upcoming May primary.
Mike St. Louis, chair of the Druid Hills Civic Association and moderator of the hourlong debate, lamented the“gratuitous” pairing of two Democratic incumbents in the same district drawn by Republicans who controlled the special legislative session on redistricting last year. The process was an effort to comply with a judge’s order to add more majority-Black districts.
House District 90, which Draper represents, will still include the part of Atlanta that is in DeKalb County, as well as six new precincts in southwest DeKalb that were in District 89, where Evans serves. Each was elected in districts that were and remain majority-Black, solid-blue districts.
No Republican or independent candidates qualified for the 2024 election for the new District 90.
Draper and Evans began and ended Wednesday’s debate acknowledging their respect for each other, and their chagrin over their political predicament, while trying to draw distinctions on their legislative records and strengths.
“This was not something that either of us asked for. It’s not something that either of us wanted,” Draper said. “And to me, it really underscores the fact that we have to get the majority in Georgia.”
Draper, a civil rights attorney serving in the House since 2023, said what makes her “the best person for the job … really boils down to democracy and diversity.” She described herself as an elections and voting rights expert who helped to “flip Georgia blue for the first time in 30 years” during the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, when she said she “led the voting rights efforts” in Georgia for President Joe Biden and U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, for whom she oversaw campaign staff and thousands of volunteers.
Draper said she’s now fighting to bring Democratic majorities back to the state House and Senate, which she estimated will likely take four to six years.
In the meantime, she said she has worked to push through what legislation she can in the Republican-controlled House and cited as a small victory House Bill 1207, a bill she crafted that requires advanced proofing of ballots by candidates and election supervisors. Draper sought out five Republicans as co-signers to gain majority support for the bill, which passed in both chambers and awaits Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature.
Noting that “diversity is a central tenet to the Democratic Party,” Draper said, “as a woman of color and as an immigrant, I bring perspectives to the table that are underrepresented at the Capitol.”
Draper immigrated to the U.S. when she was 6 years old from England, where her Spanish mother and Pakistani father met. “That makes me Spakistani,” she said, eliciting laughter from the audience. “But it also makes me the only member of the Georgia General Assembly who is a member of the Hispanic caucus and the Asian American Pacific [Islander] caucus.”
Evans, a community organizer and political operative who has served in the House since 2019, emphasized her six years of experience building relationships with fellow legislators and delivering on measures to support education, the environment, gun safety and housing.
“And I’m 100% pro-choice, 100% pro-LGBTQ and 100% pro-health care expansion,” Evans said, adding she is proud of her work developing legislation to promote literacy among school children over the past two years, including writing a bill last year to create the Georgia Council on Literacy and another bill to ensure that children are screened for dyslexia and other reading challenges and that teachers are trained in evidence-based reading and writing instruction.
When her bills didn’t pass from the House to the Senate by the Crossover Day deadline in 2023, Evans said she persuaded Republican lawmakers in the Senate to adopt her legislation, which then passed. She now serves on the 30-member literacy council, which she said is working “to make sure that all of our children will have the broadest possible futures and that they can all learn how to read.”
Evans also said she was “proud to deliver this session $7.4 million in [federal] gun violence prevention awareness funds that will go out to community groups” and to support the passage of a bipartisan Senate bill that will give “[sales] tax breaks [on gun safety devices] where people are using their guns responsibly.” She said she also advocated for adding new funding for school security grants to the education budget, which was approved.
The candidates took similar positions on many issues, both decrying the private school voucher bill they said would drain funds from public schools, and the need for the state to better fund impoverished school districts. They described their individual efforts to curtail gun violence and promote voting rights, as well as detailed their years of experience in ground-level get-out-the-vote efforts in DeKalb County and metro Atlanta. Draper and Evans also expressed measured support of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, which they said is needed to train police and first responders.
Among the 40 or so people in the audience, Lora Wuennenberg, 68, a Kirkwood resident and program manager at the humanitarian nonprofit CARE, said she emerged from the debate torn between the two candidates. Noting they have similar positions on the major issues she cares about, including public education, she said Draper, her current representative, impressed her as an “an activist who can mobilize people and is willing to stand up and stand out on some of the issues that may not be getting enough attention.”
“Becky seemed more of a practical, behind-the-scenes organizer, someone who understands the bureaucracy of government and has a lot of established contacts,” Wuennenberg said, noting Evans has worked across the aisle and “found entry points” to get legislation passed. “In the Republican-controlled House, maybe she can be more effective than Saira.”
Wuennenberg said over the next few weeks she’ll follow the candidates and look to see “how Saira thinks she can mobilize support for the bread-and-butter issues that have an impact on people’s lives” in the next legislative session.
Arica Schuett, 36, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Emory who lives in Druid Hills, said she also needs to spend more time studying the candidates.
She said Draper’s focus “on mobilizing voters and removing barriers to election participation resonated” with her, while Evans’ “experience and her ability to to work with constituencies that include Republicans is important. So getting a better understanding of how each candidate would manage their position in a really Republican Legislature is what’s important to me.”
Schuett said she plans to dive deeper into their proposed legislation and voting records. “I kind of want to look a little bit more at what they’ve done, right?”
The primary election will take place May 21.
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Barbershop talks and hip-hop summits: Georgia Black legislators’ group has big plans to build coalitions, boost voter rolls
The nation’s largest gathering of Black lawmakers is slated to meet in Atlanta this summer to discuss ways to boost voter participation nationwide ahead of the upcoming fall elections.
The Aug. 2-4 conference theme is “Testing 1, 2, 3.” The meeting will be the precursor to a series of events the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus plans to hold heading into the November presidential election.
“Because we’re the largest Black caucus in the nation, we’re reaching out to all of the caucuses from across the nation,” Rep. Carl Gilliard, D-Savannah, chairman of the 74-member Georgia caucus, told State Affairs. “This is the first time that I think we’re doing a total reach-out to all of the Black caucuses. We share a lot of similarities. Whether it’s voter suppression in Georgia, the same laws are going to be tried in Tennessee and the same laws are going to be tried in Florida. We share a lot of commonalities.”
Next week, for instance, the Georgia caucus is scheduled to issue a statement supporting efforts to pass a hate crimes bill in South Carolina. The bill passed in the House but stalled in the Senate, Gilliard noted.
Over 700 Black legislators represent about 60 million Americans, according to the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. In addition to the Georgia caucus, Black caucuses exist in nearly three dozen states.
Shortly after the August convention, the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus will embark on a 14-city tour throughout Georgia to focus on “getting out the vote.”
“We’re not going to tell them who to vote for,” Gilliard said of voters. “But what is happening right now is no one is talking to the people. And if the election were held today, we all would be in trouble because no one is talking or meeting the people where they’re at.”
The tour is a continuation of various actions the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus has taken this year to align with other organizations of people of color on common causes.
In March, the caucus joined forces with the Asian American Pacific Islander and Hispanic caucuses for a tri-caucus town hall. It was the first time the three groups have aligned. The Black caucus also has “reached out to partner with the Hindus of North America population and the diaspora,” Gilliard said.
“What we’re trying to do is form a coalition to get to as many diverse groups of people as we can,” he said.
Gilliard said the lack of individual and collective involvement in communities he’s seeing concerns him. It’s a far cry from four years ago.
In 2020, the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man murdered while jogging in Glynn County, and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed by Louisville, Kentucky police serving a no-knock warrant for drug suspicion, led to more than 450 protests nationwide and on three continents.
That same year, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams led an effort to increase the voter rolls for the 2020 presidential election. Fair Fight and the New Georgia Projects, two groups Abrams founded, registered more than 800,000 new voters.
That level of community and political engagement has since subsided, Gilliard said.
“People don’t know what’s going on,” Gilliard said. “No one is really talking to the people. You’ve got a presidential election. I’m talking about on both [political] sides. There are rallies and different events being held, but nobody has gone to the barbershop. No one has gone to the community centers or the neighborhoods. We’re going to be empowering those communities by going and taking those townhall meetings right where they’re at, not in a big municipality but in community centers and neighborhoods.”
The caucus also plans to hold a hip-hop summit to reach young people, many of whom are skeptical of both political parties.
“They’re forming their own opinions,” Gilliard said. “They’re saying, ‘Forget about Trump. We need to hear something different.’ That’s just their perception. That’s why I’m really quietly championing the young candidates behind the scenes who are running right now because we need young leaders.
“We have to get as many people together, but we also have to get them ready to work.”
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Special prosecutor to decide if Lt. Gov. Jones should face criminal charges in 2020 election-meddling case
Lt. Gov. Burt Jones will face scrutiny over whether he should be criminally charged for alleged meddling in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia said Thursday it has assigned Executive Director Pete Skandalakis as the special prosecutor to handle the case because Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is barred from investigating Jones. The council is a nonpartisan state advocacy agency for district attorneys.
In July 2022, Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney blocked Willis from investigating Jones because her actions were an “actual and untenable” conflict of interest. At the time, Willis had hosted a campaign fundraiser for Jones’ Democratic rival, Charlie Bailey, and donated to his campaign when both men were running for lieutenant governor. Willis is currently involved in an election interference case she brought against former President Donald Trump and 18 others.
McBurney’s ruling left it up to the council to decide whether Jones should be criminally charged.
“I’m happy to see this process move forward and look forward to the opportunity to get this charade behind me,” Jones said in a statement issued Thursday. “Fani Willis has made a mockery of this legal process, as she tends to do. I look forward to a quick resolution and moving forward with the business of the state of Georgia.”
The council cited state bar rules in its news release and said there would be no further comments.
Skandalakis’ appointment marks another step in the ongoing political odyssey for Jones and other lawmakers over charges that they served as “false” electors to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Jones is one of 16 alleged “false” electors in Georgia who gathered at the state capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, to cast ballots for Trump and then sent their false certification of his victory to the National Archives and the governor’s office.
Jones has denied any wrongdoing, saying he and other electors were acting on the advice of lawyers to preserve Trump’s chances in Georgia in case the former president won a court challenge that was pending at the time. Jones was a state senator during the 2020 election.
Trump’s campaign enlisted an alternate slate of electors in 2020 in a number of swing states where Trump was defeated, as part of an effort to circumvent the outcome of the voting, The New York Times reported Thursday.
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Georgia taxpayers get a tax credit for helping young adults leaving foster care
The Gist
Georgia lawmakers in 2022 laid the groundwork to help young adults leaving the foster care system get a good start in life while giving taxpayers another tax relief option.
At that time, the Georgia General Assembly passed House Bill 424, also known as the Fostering Success Act. This law created the Qualified Foster Child Donation Credit program. It’s a tax credit plan that allows taxpayers to redirect their state income tax dollars to qualified organizations providing support services to young adults transitioning out of foster care.
Capped at $20 million a year, the money is used to help young adults ages 18 to 25 once they leave foster care.
What’s Happening
The tax credit took effect in 2023. The number of qualified organizations participating in the program has nearly doubled to 39 this year from 20 last year.
A bill to increase the cap on the tax credit to $30 million a year failed during this year’s legislative session because the House and Senate couldn’t agree on whether to expand the annual cap. It remains at $20 million a year.
As of March 28, $153,000 of the $20 million fund has been approved for the 2024 tax year. Roughly $19.8 million remains.
“With this being the second year of the tax credit, this tax credit opportunity is still relatively new and unknown,” Heidi Carr, executive director of Fostering Success Act Inc., told State Affairs. “It takes a while to get the awareness around it up.”
Carr’s group is one of the qualified organizations participating in the tax credit program. The nonprofit is not connected to the government program.
Georgia taxpayers get a dollar credit for every dollar they donate to a qualified organization, up to a certain amount. Here’s how it works:
- An individual or business applies through the Georgia Department of Revenue to qualify for the tax credit. The taxpayer specifies how much to donate and which organization will get the donation.
- Once approved, the taxpayer makes a payment directly to the organization.
- When the organization receives the payment, it sends the taxpayer the documents required when filing their state tax return so they can get their tax credit. The organization also notifies the state of the transaction.
Why It Matters
Each year, more than 700 young adults leave the foster care system in Georgia. They are some of the most underserved and overlooked people in the foster care system. Many never return to their biological families or get adopted. Once they leave the system, they often have little to no guidance as they enter college or the workforce.
The fostering success funds will help those young people with education, housing, counseling, medical care and transportation services.
Money generated from the tax credit has enabled Connections Homes to help 20 young people so far this year, Founder and Chief Executive Officer Pam Parish told State Affairs.
The Alpharetta-based nonprofit’s main goal is matching young people who have left or are leaving foster care with mentoring families. However, the $20,000 received through the tax credit program allows the organization to do much more, Parish said.
In one instance, they helped a young mother of two in her early 20s who is attending college and dealing with cancer. The organization paid the former foster care youth’s rent and car note and was able to “do the things that we could worry about and let her worry about getting better and staying in school,” Parish said.
Without the money generated through the Fostering Success Act’s tax credit program, such help would have been a “funding struggle,” Parish added.
“Our main program is our mentorship, which is immensely helpful to our kids,” she said. “But really to get into these practical needs and [having] funding available to do that is really helpful for our organization but most importantly for these kids.”
The organization has helped some 350 foster youth in its 10-year existence, Parish said. She and her husband have eight daughters, seven of them adopted. Five became part of the family after the age of 18 due to various circumstances, including surviving trafficking, homelessness and aging out of foster care, she said.
Similarly, Wellroot Family Services has been able to help foster youth pursuing college degrees.
“The Fostering Success Tax Credit bolsters the housing and wraparound services we provide for those youth pursuing postsecondary education and has enabled us to provide scholarships to former foster youth,” Wellroot CEO Allison Ashe said. “Because of the tax credit and the generosity of donors, we were able to provide additional funds to some of the youth pursuing college degrees to use for books and other academic supplies.”
What’s Next?
It’s not too late to participate in the 2024 tax credit program. To qualify, taxpayers must get the state’s approval and make their payments within 60 days of being approved or by Dec. 31, whichever comes first.
Between January 1 and June 30, the following yearly contribution limits are based on the taxpayer’s filing status:
- Single individual or head of household: Up to $2,500
- Married filing jointly: Up to $5,000
- Individual owner of an S corporation, member of an LLC or partner in a partnership: Up to $5,000
- C corporation, trust, or pass-through entity electing to pay tax at entity level: Up to 10% of Georgia income tax liability
Learn more about the Fostering Success Tax Credit here. As with any tax matter, consult your tax adviser. You can find a list of certified foster child support organizations on the Department of Revenue website.
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