PHOENIX -A House committee on Tuesday endorsed a bill that would grant tuition waivers to children and spouses of fallen military personnel.
The House Committee on Higher Education voted
9-0 with one member absent to recommend passage of a rewritten version of
HB 2510, introduced by Rep. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale. Committee members said the bill would
require some tweaking to ensure recipients could claim both the state tuition waiver and federal education aid.
The bill would add members of the U.S. armed forces who lived or were stationed in Arizona to the list of those whose children and unmarried spouses are offered tuition-waiver scholarships at public universities and community colleges.
The original version of the bill would have created a new section of state law to award the tuition waivers to fallen military personnel.
"The intent was there, but the language didn't quite match up," Murphy told the committee.
The rewritten bill would also require that the tuition waiver only be applied after "federal financial aid or
benefits" had been exhausted.
Committee member Rep. Ed Ableser, D-Tempe, said he was worried the new wording would deny the tuition waiver to recipients of federal education aid, such as a Pell Grant.
Murphy said he would work on that section of the bill before it's heard on the House floor to ensure that only the benefits based on a parent's status as a veteran would affect the tuition offer.
"The intent was specifically to say that the waiver was to bridge the gap between veteran's benefits ... and not to supplant any other financial aid," he told the committee.
