CHARLESTON — With Friday the de facto deadline to move bills out of committees and with the West Virginia House of Delegates gaveling out until today, a bill to deal with concepts and teachings derived from critical race theory didn’t make it out of its final committee.

The House Judiciary Committee moved Friday evening to turn House Bill 4011, the Anti-Stereotyping Act, into a study resolution and bring it back for consideration during the 2023 legislative session in a 13-9 vote.

HB 4011 sat near the bottom of the committee’s agenda much of Friday as lawmakers worked through 15 bills and resolutions that saw lengthy debates break out over livestock trespassing, disclosure of certain information by online marketplaces, and whether to call a convention of states to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Sunday was the final day for bills to come out of committees in the house of origin, but both the House of Delegates and state Senate adjourned until today, effectively making Friday the final day to move bills out of committees. With the House gaveling out at 6:30 p.m., the House Judiciary Committee resumed its meeting afterward.

“We passed the deadline for reporting bills out of the committee,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Moore Capito, R-Kanawha, informed committee members.

Del. Steve Westfall, R-Jackson, made a motion to turn HB 4011 into a study resolution, which will allow the committee to study the issue throughout the next year during legislative interim meetings and bring the bill back for the next regular session.

“With as many calls as I’ve gotten the last week and emails against it, I think it is pretty important,” Westfall said. “As we’ve been up here many, many hours, we need to look at it over the summer and see if we can get it right.”

The bill’s lead sponsor, Del. Chris Pritt, R-Kanawha, objected to the motion, urging the committee to continue consideration of the bill.

“We’ve come this far. It shouldn’t take that much longer,” Pritt said. “Technically, the deadline for us to have this out of committee is – according to the rules – is the 27th. We can finish this up and this bill can be reported out on Monday. I think we need to take this up.”

HB 4011 would require greater curriculum transparency for public schools pertaining to non-discrimination, diversity, equity, inclusion, race, ethnicity, sex, bias or any combination of those concepts. The bill also would prohibit the teaching and discussion of specific racial and non-discrimination topics often categorized under the name critical race theory, or CRT.

The bill states that no person should be blamed for the action committed in the past by someone of the same race, sex, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Schools and county board of education officials would be prohibited from compelling students and staff to adopt any belief or concept that one race, sex, ethnicity, religion, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior to another.

The bill passed the House Education Committee on Feb. 3, with the House Judiciary Committee first taking up the bill Thursday, hearing testimony from a representative of the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation which offers model legislation similar to HB 4011.

While the bill was not reported out of the committee Friday night, it’s possible a motion could be made during today’s House floor session to discharge the bill and have it read a first time in order for it to pass by Wednesday, the day when bills must be passed out to the opposite body.

“I think this is a very, very important bill,” Pritt said. “This is an incredibly important bill to a lot of people. It’s a bill that deserves to be heard before this committee.”

(Adams can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)