![]() ![]() “It looks like they’re trying to treat districts as ‘pass-throughs’ for ESA funding, the same way some states fund charter schools through traditional district budgets,” Barnard said. Montana’s approach to funding ESAs looks different from most, Barnard said. Each time a student enrolls, the student’s home school district will send roughly $7,000 in local tax revenue and state aid to the state’s education department, which will put that money in an education savings account for the student’s family to use on a wide variety of allowable expenses.ĭisability rights groups and associations that represent public schools in the state criticized the bill, arguing it could impose steep costs on districts if even a fraction of the state’s students with disabilities sign on. State law also prohibits districts from levying taxpayers to cover those losses.Īnd in Montana, both houses of the state legislature last month passed a bill that establishes a new education savings account opportunity for students with disabilities. Their home district then sees a cut in state aid equivalent to the cost of the student’s private school voucher. In Wisconsin, families can sign up for a voucher that covers $8,000 to $9,000 in private school tuition costs for a student exiting the public school system. It’s less common for school districts themselves to directly bear the costs for local children entering private school or switching to homeschooling through one of these programs. According to the state D epartment of F inance, that fund draws from taxes on sales, income, and utilities to fuel investments in “support, maintenance, and development of public education in Alabama” as well as “other functions related to educating the state’s citizens.” In Alabama, a proposed education savings account program would draw from the state’s Education Trust Fund, the largest pot of funds in the state’s coffers. Iowa, Mississippi, and New Hampshire spend the same amount in state dollars per ESA as for each public school student, he said.įlorida and Tennessee are among the states that subtract the cost of vouchers from the state aid allocations for the districts where students taking advantage of vouchers live, said Jessica Levin, director of Public Funds Public Schools, a national nonprofit that advocates for states to meet their constitutional obligations around education for all students. And many states allocate school choice funds from the same source as the base formula for sending state aid to school districts.Īrizona, Indiana, and Arkansas fund ESAs by devoting 90 percent of the state’s base funding amount per public school student to families enrolled in the choice programs, said Christian Barnard, senior policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. Some states have specific accounts dedicated to K-12 and higher education that now serve as the funding source for vouchers, ESAs, and the like. The state’s traditional K-12 funding source Here’s a look at where funds for school choice come from-a mix of state tax revenue, local district budgets, and private donations: īut do funds for vouchers necessarily come at public schools’ expense? The sources of funds for these programs have gone underexplored, school choice experts say. By comparison, those seven states invested $54.6 billion in public K-12 schools that year, according to Census data. In 2019 alone, seven states spent $2.3 billion on vouchers, ESAs, and other forms of school choice, according to an analysis of state data by two researchers from Columbia University Teachers College. The growing costs of these programs are well documented. (So far, data from states like Arizona and New Hampshire show that most recipients of education savings accounts weren’t previously attending public school prior to signing up.) That trend in Arizona and elsewhere is sounding alarm bells for critics of the school choice movement, who argue that publicly funded school choice initiatives redirect money from struggling public schools and disproportionately benefit families who already have the means to pay for private school or homeschool. That means more than 4.5 percent of the state’s K-12 students are receiving ESA funds, with the recent expansion costing the state $200 million in as-yet-unbudgeted costs, according to the state’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee. ![]() In Arizona, the education savings account program grew from roughly 10,000 recipients in mid-2022 to nearly 54,000 as of May 1 after the state opened eligibility to all students last year, according to the state education department. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |