Rep. Gina Hinojosa, HD 49

Photo by Jana Birchum

"This is going to be the public education session, for better or worse," Rep. Gina Hinojosa told the Chronicle. "Either we're going to step up and address that our public schools are in crisis in this state or we're going to take a massive sledgehammer to our schools and further privatize them."

By "further privatize them," Hinojosa is referring to long-held proposals by Republican leaders, most prominently Senate Bill 176 by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, who last session was a House member who chaired the chamber's hard-right Freedom Caucus. Middleton's bill would create a "school choice" system of education vouchers, which he grandly titles the "Texas Parental Empowerment Act of 2023." A longtime goal of evangelical Christians and a recent focus of more secular culture warriors, vouchers would allow parents to take the taxes they pay to public schools and use them instead to pay for their children's private schools, including faith-based schools – draining resources from public education and weakening its infrastructure.

Hinojosa will devote much energy this session to fighting vouchers and getting more money to public school districts and teachers. She has also filed bills to permit pharmacies to sell birth control pills over the counter (House Bill 1050); allow college students to use the funds they receive from grants to qualify for apartment rentals (HB 649); and prohibit landlords from raising rents after a lease application is submitted but before it's accepted (HB 1049).

Hinojosa has also authored HB 1057, which would address the practice by financial institutions of buying up middle-class single-family homes and even whole neighborhoods as investments, yet another contributor to the skyrocketing cost of Austin housing. "This is a national problem and it has hit us particularly hard in Travis County, where the biggest buyers of homes are financial institutions like hedge funds," Hinojosa said. "So we just filed a bill that said financial institutions can't buy a home until that property has been on the market for a month – because they come in with cash and they disadvantage regular people."