Two sides of a coin – school choice versus public school funding. While school choice can open up new opportunities for students to explore their education, a decrease in public school funding can limit pre-existing opportunities.
School choice policies make it easier for families to choose educational opportunities other than their nearest public school, expanding educational opportunities and potentially providing for a more tailored education.
Such policies are most often facilitated through school vouchers, which are government-funded stipends provided to families, assisting in paying for a school of their choice. Vouchers are most often used towards private school tuition, providing students with more options regarding their schooling.
However, funding for vouchers is derived from general education funding, decreasing the finances received by public schools.
In 2023, the Texas House voted 84-63 to take school choice vouchers off a state educational funding bill. For lawmakers who had fought for school choice legislation, the vote was a major setback.
In response, Texas Governor Greg Abbott endorsed 15 challengers who are in support of school vouchers, 11 of which won their respective elections. According to Abbott, the House now has 79 “hardcore school choice proponents,” enough to pass voucher legislation through congress.
”Assuming that nobody changes their mind now that they’re in office, the election has the likelihood of making it easier for vouchers to get passed than it was two years ago,” Coppell ISD trustee Nichole Bentley said.
CISD and all public school districts receive state funding based on Average Daily Allotment (ADA) numbers, which are dependent on the number of students in attendance each day. School districts receive a certain amount of money per student in attendance per day, with the current amounts being $94.61 per elementary student, $123.23 per middle school student and $157.54 per high school student. According to Bentley, ADA funding has not changed since 2019, despite inflation and increasing required costs for the district, thus decreasing the district’s budget.
Bentley makes the distinction between the ADA funding and funding from property taxes, stating that property tax funds are what are likely going to be used to fund school choice vouchers. Once received, property taxes are reapportioned by the state and distributed between public school districts. The state can choose how it wants to reapportion the funds, thus deciding how much funding certain schools receive and what ventures property taxes may be used towards.
“ The reality is that, for property owners across the state, property tax money is not going to your local school district; it’s actually going to Austin,” Bentley said. “That’s what they’re potentially going to use to fund these voucher programs.”
Funding received by school districts from property tax reapportionment could decrease with school choice legislation, as the same amount of money is received by the state but a greater portion of it is used towards voucher financing rather than direct school funding. As such, Bentley said ADA funding must increase for the district to not suffer from voucher proposals.
“All of the voucher funding proposals that have been put out there are detrimental to our district unless the average daily allotment increases,” Bentley said.
CISD trustee Manish Sethi said vouchers may lead to decreased enrollment in CISD due to students choosing to attend private or charter schools instead, further decreasing the funding received by the district through ADA.
“When we lose a couple of students, it doesn’t amount to a reduction in teachers or in whatever is needed to maintain a school,” Sethi said. “Our cost doesn’t really come down, but our enrollment does go down, and that greatly affects our ability to continue to fund our services.”
Bentley said the original intent of vouchers is not being met by new legislation, impacting their benefit.
“The original concept of vouchers, of kids in underperforming school districts having an option to go somewhere else for their education, makes sense on the surface,” Bentley said. “But now, they’ve evolved into covering charter and private school tuition, which wasn’t the original idea.If you do that, vouchers really become a supplement for people who can already afford private schools, and the families that vouchers were originally intended for probably aren’t the people who are primarily going to benefit from them.”
CHS Principal Laura Springer said when vouchers draw away money from public schools, they enhance socio-economic divisions that may already be present.
“I’m all about equality,” Springer said. “I don’t care where you’re from, I don’t care about your ethnicity, I don’t care about your sexual orientation, I don’t care about any of that. You are a child in my building, and I’m going to bust my tail to give you the best education you can have and help you in any way I can. The more programs the state pulls away from us that allow us to help students with mental health issues, poorer kids through our title money and give to the rich schools, all you’re saying is that you want to divide and you don’t want that gap changed.”
Additionally, according to Bentley and supported by research from Princeton and Brown University, many private schools may increase their tuition costs to account for the funding provided by vouchers, mitigating the impact of such funding ventures on the affordability of alternative schooling options.
The effects of vouchers may not be visible immediately, because such funding bills take a while to implement, and because the details of such a bill may change during the legislative process. Based on the experiences of other states, however, Bentley said school choice legislation will likely have negative impacts on state funding and budget.
“ Without fail, for all the states that have done vouchers, they just becomes this incredibly expensive behemoth that states can’t afford by the third or fifth year,” Bentley said.
The effects of voucher legislation on CISD may vary between the elementary and secondary school levels. Bentley said students at the elementary level are likely less affected by such legislation, although some effects of budget cuts have already presented themselves.
“ Our elementary campuses are going to be fuller – we’ve got rid of one campus, so now we have the same number of elementary students in one less building,” Bentley said. “ Hopefully we don’t have to get rid of any of our specials or become an incredibly watered down version of ourselves. I think everybody on the board and in our community would fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.”
At the middle and high school level, the effects could vary.
“ For middle and high school, vouchers might mean more limited CTE offerings, less travel for sports, band, choir or some of our extracurriculars,” Bentley said. “It might mean that we need our booster clubs to do more fundraising and help cover some additional expenses.”
According to Sethi, CISD is committed to maintaining the amount and quality of extracurricular programs offered in the district, despite any funding changes.
“We use a phrase among the board: programs over facilities,” Sethi said. “Real student success, whether that be pure academics, fine arts or athletics, comes from our programs, so we would rather close down facilities even if that highly negatively disrupts routines.”
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