JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Missouri Senate gave first-round approval to a sweeping education bill Wednesday evening which aims to address the school transfer crisis facing Missouri’s failing schools.

The body perfected a bill sponsored by State Sen. David Pearce, R-Warrensburg, after two days of debate on the Senate floor and weeks of private negotiation. The bill would allow schools to be accredited individually instead of only by school district and require failing unaccredited districts – defined by 55 percent failing schools – to pay much of the tuition costs for students to attend neighboring school districts.

Pearce said the point of his bill was to limit the number of transfers to as few as possible.

“Transfers are the last resort. They’re something to be avoided,” he said. “If we can do something to keep people in their own districts, everybody wins.”

The bill comes in response to the crisis in the St. Louis region surrounding the failing Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts, and ahead of a similar school transfer situation in the Kansas City area.

The Normandy School District and Kansas City schools, under the bill’s definition of unaccredited, would not be considered unaccredited. Riverview Gardens would be.

The bill marks some of the first meaningful movement on the school transfer issue in recent memory. Pearce worked with a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, including Sen. Maria Chapelle-Nadal, a Democrat whose district includes some of the failing schools, in order to move the bill through the Senate.

“We’ve come together as a committee and as a Senate,” she said. “It has truly been an exercise of give and take.”

Despite a push against it on Tuesday night, the bill includes a provision that would allow state dollars follow students to private schools that have been accredited by the state and that administer state tests. On the same night, language was stripped from the bill that would have ended teacher tenure for educators in failing schools.

The bill would limit what unaccredited districts would have to pay for transfers by offering some state funds to make up some of the difference. An amendment pushed by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Glendale, would set up a state fund to subsidize 10 percent tuition costs for transfer students. Schmitt also backed an amendment that would allow

An amendment, backed by Sen. Ed Emery, R-Lamar, failed that would have allowed state dollars to go toward virtual schools.

Other bills have been filed in the House. Chapelle-Nadal said on Wednesday she was adding a handful of amendments in order to avert the need for changes when the bill is taken up in the House.

“I’m trying to do some preemptive measures before it goes to the other side,” she said.