(The Center Square) – The Supreme Court of Georgia has received the direct appeal involving Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ attempt to squash a Senate committee subpoena.

The Senate Special Committee on Investigations subpoenaed Wills to testify about her office’s prosecution of President Donald Trump and others. Willis fought the subpoena, but Fulton County Superior Court Judge Skukura L. Ingram denied Willis’ effort to quash it.

The Senate committee last met in March and decided to ask Willis’ attorney, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, for some dates when Willis could appear.

“Let’s be nice guys again first,” said Chairman Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, said at the meeting. “Let’s reach out to her counsel and suggest either a Thursday or Friday beginning the last week of April, the first two weeks of May. And if they agree to a date, then we will issue a subpoena. And I believe they will honor their word.”

Willis has still not appeared before the committee.

The committee also instructed Josh Belinfante, an attorney representing the committee, to request that Willis be responsible for any of the attorney’s fees charged to the committee after May 10.

“Make her comply if she won’t, make her pay for your fees, make her do what the judge has already told her she’s got to do,” Cowsert said.

Willis was disqualified from the Trump case because of her personal relationship with the lead prosecutor. She is also appealing that decision.

Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill last month that would allow defendants to receive “reasonable court costs” if the prosecutor was disqualified from the case. Democrats said the bill was filed at the behest of Trump because of the Georgia case but Republicans denied it.

“There is absolutely nothing in this bill that focuses on a single county nor does it have a sunset for a single issue,” said Rep. Chuck Martin, R-Alpharetta, who presented the bill in the Senate.

(The Center Square) – Tennessee lawmakers are questioning why two counties with virtual schools are reaping thousands in state funding at the expense of the state’s other 93.

Union and Johnson counties have the most significant percentage of the state’s 59 virtual schools, according to information presented at Thursday’s meeting of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.

The virtual students were counted as attending school in Union and Johnson counties, even though they could live elsewhere.

“The effect of including their virtual school students in the fiscal capacity calculations, keeping all else the same, was an increase in state funding for Union and Johnson counties and decrease in state funding for the other 93 counties,” research director Michael Mount said in his presentation.

Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Nashville, said the state should have a way of knowing where the virtual students reside.

“It’s strange to me that we’re calculating it this way when every other student is calculated based on where they reside,” Campbell said.

The Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement that took effect in the 2023-24 school year is calculated using base funding, weighted funding, direct funding, and outcomes funding. The base funding is $7,205 per student for the 2025-26 school year.

Sen. Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville, said he didn’t think virtual schools should be a “money maker.”

“I think we’re creating a dangerous incentive system on the virtual education side that we should be very careful about doing especially based on their current low performance in the state,” he said.

Two virtual schools in Johnson County received “D” grades according to 2024 performance metrics published on the Tennessee Department of Education website. The county’s population is 17,982, according to the 2024 County Data Package from the Department of Health.

The virtual Tennessee Connections Academy for grades 9-12 has 1,496 students and received one of the “D” grades. Johnson County High School has 599 students, according to the Education Department.

The Tennessee Connections Academy for grades 4-8 also received a “D” and has 1,315 students. The county’s four elementary schools and its middle school have a combined enrollment of 1,238 students, according to the education department.

Commission Chairman Ken Yager, R-Kingston, said the questions raised are important. He asked the executive director to prepare a separate report on the issue for the commission’s next meeting.

(The Center Square) – Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education challenging a grant program for Hispanics that he said is discriminatory.

Skrmetti raises questions about the Hispanic-Serving Institution program that provides substantial federal funding for needy students only to colleges and universities that have a student body comprised of 25% or more Hispanic students.

“Despite their general eligibility, no Tennessee public institution of higher education is eligible for the HSI program. The reason? Tennessee’s colleges and universities each have an enrollment of undergraduate full-time students that is lower than 25 percent Hispanic students,” Skrmetti said in the lawsuit provided by his office. “The University of Memphis, for example, is ineligible for the grant despite its 61% minority enrollment because its student body is insufficiently diverse according to the federal government’s arbitrary requirement.”

The Department of Education awarded $45.7 million in grants for the Hispanic-Serving Institution program in fiscal year 2022. The grants, given to 78 schools, are worth up to $600,000 a year for five years, Skrmetti said. Congress allocated $228.9 million for the program in fiscal year 2024.

“The HSI program also puts Tennessee’s colleges and universities to an unconstitutional dilemma. Either they continue to serve their Hispanic students lawfully, in which case they are ineligible for grants under the program, or else they engage in affirmative action to satisfy the program’s discriminatory criterion, which is illegal,” Skrmetti said in the suit. 

The nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions is joining Tennessee in the lawsuit. The organization sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the schools’ affirmative action admission policies in 2023.

“Chief Justice John Roberts unequivocally articulated in SFFA v. Harvard that ‘the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual – not on the basis of race,'” the attorney general’s office said in a news release. “Tennessee’s Office of the Attorney General and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. echo that same fundamentally American principle throughout this lawsuit.”

The suit is filed in the U.S. District Court’s Eastern Tennessee division in Knoxville.