Southeast Iowa school superintendents are frustrated and concerned about a new school voucher law approved by lawmakers and signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds.
The law will create universal school choice across Iowa within three years and provides state-funded accounts within the next two years for parents who meet income requirements and want to send their kids to private schools. The plan includes creating education savings accounts for parents at a cost estimated at $918 million a year.
But public schools stand to lose about $7,600 per student and receive about $1,200 to offset the loss. Central Lee Community School District Superintendent Andy Crozier said Iowa public schools already face budget shortfalls and have been underfunded for the past decade.
“We've lagged behind all of our neighboring states, in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Missouri,” Crozier said. “All of them have increased their public schools’ funding by a wider margin than in the state of Iowa. Our legislators have told us for years there's not enough money to adequately fund public education at the levels that we have advocated for. Now we get to this year, and they're going to invest a billion dollars into private schools? I have a hard time understanding where the argument came from that they don't have the money to adequately fund public schools for the last ten years, but we also have found a billion dollars to put into private schools.”
The law provides a student $7,598 in an education savings account the state provides to attend private school. Crozier said the new school funding provision will still allow private schools to admit who they chose and require public schools to admit the rest.
“Public schools are required to take every kid that walks into school,” he said. “You walk into our school, we're going to provide you a free and quality education, where private schools can pick and choose. So just because we have a student that's going to get $7,000 in the form of a voucher to go to a private school, that doesn't mean that private school accepts them.”
Keokuk Community School District Interim Superintendent Dan Mart agreed with Crozier and said the new law will still allow private schools to select which students to accept, while public schools will stand to serve the rest of the state’s students with fewer resources.
“We, as public schools, are held to a level of standard as determined by Iowa Department of Education and that's not going to be the same for the private schools,” Mart said. “They will be accredited by their owns means, which might not be as rigorous as the standards that we’re upheld to.”
Crozier also said Reynolds and the General Assembly’s Republican majority did not listen Iowa taxpayers, most of whom opposed the voucher bill.
“The voucher bill in Iowa was very unpopular among the majority of Iowans, and yet they rammed it down everyone's throats,” Crozier said. “Listening to people in Lee County, Henry County and Van Buren County would be a great start on how we figure out how we're going to respect public education and give it the funding it deserves.”
“The frustration has been over the years that we don't have any more money to give public school, we're doing the best we can,” Mart said. “But all of a sudden this has come out of nowhere, and now we have money to do it.”
The law goes into effect later this year for the 2023-2024 school year.
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