The House Education Committee will have a new — and possibly more conservative — chairman next session.

Oakley Republican Rep. Douglas Pickett, a rancher and second-term lawmaker, will likely be a point person as the Legislature revisits the heated issue of private school choice. Multiple private school choice bills are likely to surface during the 2025 legislative session, and House Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star, has said he wants to get a private school choice bill passed in 2025.

Pickett was something of a last-minute choice. Until Wednesday night’s GOP leadership elections, Pickett said he was focused on a run for assistant majority leader. When Eagle Republican Josh Tanner won the assistant majority leader’s post, Pickett’s focus turned to House Education.

“When that was decided, that’s when the whole field opens up,” Pickett told Idaho Education News Thursday afternoon, after the House announced its committee assignments.

The House Education chair was a big piece of the puzzle Thursday morning, as lawmakers held their organizational session to elect floor leadership and carve up committee assignments.

Some change on House Education was inevitable coming into the week.

Former chairwoman Julie Yamamoto, R-Caldwell, lost in the May GOP primary, creating a vacancy at the top.

Vice chairwoman Lori McCann, R-Lewiston, survived a hotly contested primary and a general election challenge. But while McCann was re-elected, she was passed over for the committee chair’s spot.

The move would appear to push House Education to the right, particularly on private school choice.

Pickett did not serve on House Education in his first term. However, he did serve on the House Revenue and Taxation Committee — and in March, he voted for a controversial bill to create a $50 million tax credit and grant program to support private school tuition. The bill died in committee.

McCann, like Yamamoto, has been openly skeptical of any tax credit or education savings accounts bills falling under the heading of private school choice. And over the past two legislative sessions, House Education had set itself up as a roadblock against private school choice bills; as a result, House leadership routed the private school tax credit bill away from House Education and over to Revenue and Taxation.

Legislators and state superintendent Debbie Critchfield could be working on competing versions of bills designed to break the private school choice logjam. 

“We’ll anticipate several versions of that,” Pickett said, “and we’ll look forward to seeing what the department brings.”

Pickett has a mixed voting record on Idaho Launch, a postsecondary aid program that has narrowly passed the Legislature the past two years. He opposed a 2024 bill to rework the Launch program.

In 2024, Pickett voted for House Bill 521, a landmark law to earmark $1.5 billion of state money for local school facilities. The previous year, Pickett supported a predecessor law, House Bill 292, a property tax relief measure designed to offset the cost of school bond issues and levies.

Rep. Dale Hawkins, a second-term Republican from Fernwood, will serve as House Education’s vice chairman. A hardline conservative, Hawkins sat on House Education during his first term, and now sits on a House-Senate task force scrutinizing diversity, equity and inclusion programs on college campuses.

While Pickett will be a newcomer to House Education, nine of the committee’s 14 members are holdovers from 2024: Republicans Lance Clow of Twin Falls; Barbara Ehardt of Idaho Falls; Dan Garner of Clifton; Ron Mendive of Coeur d’Alene; Jack Nelsen of Jerome; Mark Sauter of Sandpoint; Tony Wisniewski of Post Falls; Hawkins; and Democrat Chris Mathias of Boise.

Rounding out House Education are four first-term lawmakers: Reps. Kyle Harris, R-Lewiston; Kent Marmon, R-Caldwell; Steve Tanner, R-Nampa; and Monica Church, D-Boise.

Senate Education may move toward mainstream

The Senate Education Committee, meanwhile, appears to be headed the other direction on private school choice. 

Four seats turned over on a committee that had been more accommodating for proposals to fund private school tuition. Three former committee members, Sens. Lori Den Hartog, Brian Lenney and Tammy Nichols, sponsored private school choice bills in the last two years. 

Nichols, R-Middleton, is the only member of the trio who will remain on Senate Education. Senate Republicans elected Den Hartog, R-Meridian, as majority leader, and Lenney, R-Nampa, will serve as vice chairman of the Commerce and Human Resources Committee. 

Former Sen. Scott Herndon, a Republican from Sagle and leader among the party’s hardline conservative wing, lost his reelection bid to Sen. Jim Woodward. 

Woodward, R-Sagle, joins three other new members of the committee — all Republicans. Sen. Kevin Cook, former chairman of the Commerce and Human Resources Committee, will serve as Senate Education’s vice chairman. Sens. Van Burtenshaw and Christy Zito, an ally of the Idaho Freedom Caucus, are also additions. 

Burtenshaw, R-Terreton, and Cook, R-Idaho Falls, opposed two bills to fund private schooling in 2023 — one to create a “universal” education savings account program and the other to add tuition as an eligible expense to the Empowering Parents program. And Woodward is a skeptic. 

“Any expenditure of public funds requires accountability for public funds,” he responded to EdNews’ voter guide earlier this year. “The voucher programs that I’ve seen to date do not have adequate accountability measures.”

Sen. Dave Lent will return as chairman of Senate Education. 

A Republican from Idaho Falls and a Critchfield ally, Lent voted against private school choice bills that cleared the panel in 2023. He also supported Critchfield’s proposal to tie some school funding to student outcomes, but Senate Education hardliners defeated the bill. 

On school choice and other issues, Lent frequently locked horns with the committee’s more conservative members, who last year voted down his proposal to relax school reporting requirements. 

But he’ll likely find most of the new members more amenable to his policy priorities like Idaho Launch. 

Senate Education’s two Democratic members, Sens. Janie Ward-Engelking and Carrie Semmelroth, both from Boise, are also returning this session. They could cast critical votes on  private school choice proposals.