Gov. Kim Reynolds

Iowa legislators are now considering a 65-page bill introduced by Gov. Kim Reynolds that aims to expand school choices for Iowa parents and students. The bill’s three main components include establishing state funding for students who wish to attend private or home school, creating a charter program and allowing students to transfer out of schools with a voluntary or court-ordered diversity plan.

The bill proposes school vouchers, which would allow parents to use public funds in order to send their students to private school. Public schools receive about $7,048 per student of public funds — a voucher system would let about $5,200 of these funds go toward private education.

“Those are public funds that are going to private schools and that’s not the way the system is set up, ever, to be done that way,” said Highland and Lone Tree Superintendent Ken Crawford. “Public money should go to public schools.”

Crawford likened the voucher system, along with the removal of the open enrollment deadline, to a “free agency situation,” which would harm public schools.

“I don’t know why the arrogance of Des Moines is thinking this is going to be better for Iowa when, statistically and in studies, it’s been shown that it does not make for a better educational system and it does not make for student gain or achievement,” Crawford said. “If you follow the data and follow the statistics, it’s clear that this is a bad idea and yet they continue to push it as parent choice, when really it’s about taking public money away from public schools.”

While Mid-Prairie Superintendent Mark Schneider said he is a champion and supporter of private education, he said the school voucher system is “just bad tax policy.”

“I view it as taxation without representation,” Schneider said. “If a Mid-Prairie tax payer has a problem with how we spend out tax money — money that they’ve paid in property tax, income tax and gas tax — they can come to the school board and give a presentation, they can show up to a budget hearing and take exception to that, they can work to get the superintendent terminated and replaced or they can run for the school board themselves, get elected and then have influence about how that tax money is spent.”

“But if you give public funds to a private school and somebody in that district doesn’t like how their money is being spent, there’s not recourse for that.”

Schneider said citizens should consider a comparable transportation voucher system, where all tax funds spent on transportation would be divvied up among all the licensed drivers in the state, who would then be able to decide how their allocation is spent.

“People could say, ‘I don’t want my money to be spent on anything besides the road that runs in front of my house, I don’t care about any other roads,’” Schneider said. “Where would we be if we had a system like that?”

Crawford said he envisions small and rural schools that are near a metropolitan school area would see a drastic shift of students going back and forth, which would create detrimental chaos out of a system that is currently working.

“Once your school starts losing people, then it’s going to start losing programs and teachers and that’s really going to hurt the fabric of your community,” Crawford said. “Des Moines is telling us, ‘We know what’s best for you,’ but local control has always been a foundation of Iowa schools. That control is eroding faster and faster with the politicians in Des Moines right now.”

Crawford encourages citizens to contact their legislative representatives and speak out against Reynold’s bill. He hopes the legislators will listen to the wishes of their constituents.

“The communication between the democrats and republicans in the State House is just nonexistent anymore and that’s just now how I envision politics in Iowa,” he said. “It’s party line-based and it’s just one group against the other and we can’t work together to make a better system.”