GOP BILLS NOW SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY IN MISSOURI SENATE

For Republicans in the Missouri Senate, holding majority status for the first time in 52 years is producing one amazing result: Our bills actually get voted out of committee and placed on the Senate calendar. Will wonders never cease? From this position, many of our bills are in position to receive timely consideration by the full Senate, actually being debated, followed by the up-or-down vote that has so often eluded our measures these last five decades.

Last year, a paltry one out of 10 bills allowed out on the Senate calendar had a Republican as the prime sponsor. The vast majority of these few were innocuous, non-controversial bills with wide support, decidedly not of the major, substantive variety. So it has been for most of the eight years since this writer arrived there.

Imagine the change this year when, of the first eight bills up for consideration, two were sponsored by this writer and another three by state Sen. Rosanne Bentley, my Republican colleague from Springfield. (Of the six women senators in the 34-member body, four are Republicans and two are Democrats.)

Bentley had a package of bills dealing with improving the delivery of dental care to poor children.

My own first bill to win first-round approval was Senate Bill 32, which deals with equalizing funding for the schooling of deaf and blind children. This idea was brought to me by a Chaffee resident, Dan Heeb, whose six-year-old son is profoundly deaf. The situation that confronts parents of children dealing with such disabilities is stark: If they pack their child off to the Missouri School for the Deaf, the state will spend over $40,000 on the special needs of educating that child. If the parents choose to keep their child in their local public school, however, they're lucky if the district can afford an additional $600 to educate that child.

This isn't fair, especially when sending a child off to Fulton, Mo., site of the Missouri School for the Deaf, disrupts family life to such an extent. No wonder many parents prefer to keep their child at home in their local district. They shouldn't suffer financial penalties for making that choice.

SB 32 provides that when students eligible to attend the Missouri School for the Deaf or the Missouri School for the Blind who instead attend a local school district, that district may bill the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for excess costs of educating such students. Reimbursement of the local districts is subject to appropriation, as state budgetary constraints permit.

(We had tried to pass this last year and got it voted out of the Education Committee, but it was never turned in for timely placement on the calendar.)

Another bill of mine, Senate Bill 123, was debated this week but failed to win the first-round approval won by SB 32. This is my third try at passing a bill disallowing the bogus lawsuits being filed by cities against manufacturers of firearms. When other senators sought to attach amendments and time ran out, the bill was laid over on the informal calendar, whence it may be called up at any time by the majority floor leader, who may be understood as the Senate's traffic cop. This one has broad bipartisan support in both House and Senate, so we have a good chance of passage if we can get it to a vote.

Peter Kinder of Cape Girardeau is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and is president pro tem of the Missouri Senate