The 2023 Legislative Session kicked off on January 9th. I was proud and honored to be sworn in to continue serving as your District 57 State Representative.
Our first order of business was to elect a Speaker of the House and Speaker Pro Tempore who will lead our chamber over the next two years. Speaker Jon Burns (R-Newington) was elected to serve as the 75th Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives by acclamation. Speaker Pro Tempore Jan Jones (R-Milton) was re-elected to her position, also by acclamation.
We also voted to set the legislative calendar. You can find a copy of the full legislative calendar here.
Next week the Legislature will hold Joint House and Senate Appropriations hearings. You can watch them here starting Monday, Jan. 17th at 10 A.M. You can see the current schedule of presentations here. |
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New House Rules This week the House voted on the House Rules for the 2023 Legislative Session. These new House Rules chip away at open records access.
Historically, communications among legislators during the legislative drafting process are excepted from open records requests. The new Rules attempt to shield communications not only among legislators, but also those between legislators and third parties. When legislators rely on third party experts to perfect legislation, shielding those discussions is probably fine, but the rule changes are written broadly and could potentially block public access to communications between legislators and other branches of government, which I think is a bad idea.
I posed questions to expose some of the dangers of these changes during the discussion of the new Rules. You can watch my exchange with the presenter here. |
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DAWGS ON TOP I am getting pretty used to congratulating the Dawgs on winning the National Championship! I was lucky enough to attend the game in Los Angeles, with my husband, Andrew. I’m a proud Double Dawg and I could not be more thrilled with what my alma mater accomplished this year. |
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Expanded Access to HOPE The HOPE Scholarship personally changed my life. Without it, I never would have been able to afford to attend the University of Georgia, so making sure it is available to help students today is personal to me. I’ve been fighting for over a decade to expand HOPE after it was drastically cut in 2011.
I’ve repeatedly introduced legislation that would make the HOPE Grant for technical college equal full tuition (since 2011 it has covered only a percentage of tuition). This year the fiscal note to make this change is only $2.9 million—out of the over $1 BILLION Lottery for Education funds available.
I am thrilled to report that the Governor’s budget proposal includes full tuition at Georgia’s public higher education institutions for all HOPE Grant and HOPE Scholarship recipients. This will make a huge difference for students and families and I applaud Governor Kemp for taking this step to help students and our workforce.
I spoke to 11 Alive about HOPE issues on Wednesday. See my interview below. |
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House Page Program is back!
After a pause for several years because of COVID, the House Page Program is back!
The program is for Georgia’s students between 12 and 18 years of age and older to visit the State Capitol, learn about the legislative process, and help facilitate business on the House floor by relaying messages between legislators and citizens and lobbyists, delivering copies of legislation, and performing other tasks.
This year we will only have 5 slots per representative. If your child would like to apply to serve as a page this Legislation Session, please fill out this form by January 27th and email it to my Chief of Staff, Kennedie McClung at [email protected]. |
Meet My Staff |
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Chief of Staff Kennedie graduated from Oglethorpe University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and minored in Sociology. She is originally from Atlanta and enjoys helping the constituents of her hometown. She would like to pursue a career in politics and law. I am thrilled to have her on my team! You can contact her at [email protected] |
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Legislative Aide Christopher is a second year graduate student, PhD, at the University of Georgia. He is pursuing his PhD in Human Development & Family Science. He also has a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Texas State University, and a M.S. in Human Services from Capella University. He hopes to gain more insight to the legislative process and policy side of his field through his internship. |
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State Representative HD 57 770-710-4087 |
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