FERRIDAY — The Louisiana House of Representatives passed two controversial education reform bills early Friday morning, bills District 21 Rep. Andy Anders said he voted against because they threatened local school funding and because he felt like legislators weren’t given enough time to consider them.

One bill, House Bill 976, would ultimately expand the charter school system and would create a public-to-private school voucher system for students in a school district with a D or F on Louisiana’s letter-grade accountability rating system. The second bill, House Bill 974, works to redefine teacher tenure and ties teacher pay and job security to student performance.

Anders, D-Clayton, said he communicated with the five school superintendents in his district, as well as with numerous teachers and community members, about the bills. The charter school bill troubled him, he said, because it could undermine funding in already cash-strapped rural districts.

“When you have a charter school that is going to open in Concordia and the people from Catahoula and Tensas (parishes) are going to come, it takes the funds from the public school there,” he said.

“If you take funds out of Catahoula and you take funds out of Tensas, those are already working in the red, so it would just be diminishing the public school system in the parish.”

The bill also fails to protect state funding for locally funded school districts in rural areas that depend on it, he said.

“Our tax bases are so low, so we have to use lots more state funds than other areas,” Anders said. “What works in Baton Rouge and New Orleans doesn’t always work in the rural areas. We have mostly agriculture-related properties, we just don’t have the tax base that some of these other parishes have.”

The bill linking teacher evaluation to student performance doesn’t take into consideration wider social factors — such as poverty — that some school districts face, Anders said.

“You have to have a teacher getting evaluated on their performance after only getting to spend the school time with them,” he said “A teacher may get a good class this year and next year she might get a struggling class, and then you don’t know what she is going to get the next year.”

Then, there was the issue of timing.

“The governor himself, before they ever filed the bill, called me to ask if I was in support of the governor’s education package,” Anders said. “I hadn’t even seen the governor’s package — the governor had this planned out like a play or a recital. I told them back then that until I read the bill I wasn’t for anything. When I did get the package I had lots of questions, and I still haven’t had them all answered.”

Anders said he told the leadership four days ago the process didn’t need to barrel through the legislature.

“I have 200 miles and five superintendents, and it takes a while to communicate” he said. “They didn’t take my advice.”

Regardless of the outcome, Anders said he will sleep easy because he felt his votes against the bills were in the right.

“You feel good in your heart that you did the right thing,” he said. “Whatever happens now happens.”