AP NewsBy KIM CHANDLERApril 8, 2025More than half of families who applied for Alabama’s new school voucher program have children attending a private school or are home schooling, numbers that buoy school choice advocates who say the flood of applications proves the approach is what parents wantAlabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s office released application figures Tuesday for the CHOOSE Act, the new program which will help eligible families tap state dollars to help pay for private school or home-schooling costs. Families submitted 22,167 applications for a total of 36,873 students.Ivey said the robust number of applications are a sign that, “clearly, taxpaying Alabama families want school choice.”
However,
The numbers showed that more than half of the applications come for students who are already attending a private school or being home-schooled. Of those 36,873 students, 10,287 students are from public schools, 15,436 students are from private schools and 9,070 are homeschooled.[...]Supporters say the programs let parents choose how best to educate their children. Critics say it drains money from public schools to help families who may have already decided to enroll their children in a private school.“I’m concerned about the fact that we have about 150 failing schools and those schools need additional revenue,” Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, said referencing the designation for schools with low test scores.
That is my concern also... the school voucher programs help up and middle income families. For some it is enough to kick them up enough so that they can afford a private school and the voucher funds take away from the public schools.
The Republicans are jumping up and down about Social Security fraud but are tight-lipped fraud in their pet project... school vouchers!
Lawmakers try to tighten rules after most homeschool voucher funds went toward non-academic expensesArkansas timesby Austin GelderApril 10, 2025The majority of voucher money the state gave homeschool families this school year went toward non-educational expenses, and a bill to change that is getting a dicey reception at the Arkansas Capitol.State senators were divided this week on Senate Bill 625, a clean-up bill for the 2023 LEARNS Act, which created Arkansas’s school voucher program. SB625 would require homeschool families to put most of their state funding toward academics instead of extracurriculars. The bill failed in a sparsely attended committee meeting Wednesday, but the full Senate pulled the bill out of committee and passed it on Thursday. It next goes to the House side, where it will likely see further debate.SB625, sponsored by Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville), puts parameters on how the roughly $7,000 in taxpayer dollars each homeschool student in the state can now claim in voucher form can be spent.
Hmm... how about a new swimming pool? My homeschooled children needs to learn water safety!
The new rules are needed, she said, because data from the current school year, the first in which vouchers were available to certain categories of homeschoolers, revealed that most of that money went toward non-academic expenses.[...]Those non-educational expenses include extracurriculars and transportation, and the fact that most of the homeschool voucher money went for those costs shouldn’t come as a big surprise. In November, the Arkansas Times reported on the phenomenon of homeschool families putting voucher money toward horseback riding lessons, baseball coaches and other decidedly non-scholastic endeavors.
So my example of vouchers paying for a swimming pool, I can see how some parents my lie and say it is for swimming lessons! Public Funds Public Schools writes,
The fanciest voucher out there these days is the “education savings account” (or “education freedom account” in places like Arkansas or New Hampshire). There’s an almost frantic effort by the voucher lobby to avoid the “V” word, and some of that includes genuine self-delusion that these ESAs/EFAs are actually something other than vouchers with extra allowable expenses beyond private school tuition. But that’s all an ESA is: tuition plus.Some states like Iowa and Arkansas still have fairly limited packages in that “plus” bucket: mostly add-on costs associated with attending private school itself, such as textbooks, uniforms, school fees and so on, with limited homeschool expenses thrown in as well. In other states like Arizona and Florida, these add-ons are far more permissive, from educational materials on Amazon to Disney World field trip passes.One side argument that research-aware voucher lobby folks make is that the horrific academic outcomes suffered by lower- and middle-income voucher users will go away because these new laws aren’t creating vouchers, just “ESAs.” But there’s no educational theory of action—and no brand of common sense—that says students will make up academic losses just because their parents can now use vouchers on backyard trampolines and SeaWorld tickets on top of tuition at private schools that don’t deliver academically.[...]One problem with this new array of school voucher designs is that some programs do make it even easier for fraud, misuse, or simple errors to occur involving large sums of public dollars. When a state education or revenue agency is administering the voucher system and directly reimbursing private schools or parents for demonstrable tuition expenses, it’s a bit easier to keep track of spending, especially when routine audits accompany that activity. But in the ESA/tax credit voucher versions, new opportunities for waste and even fraud can and do occur.In Arizona, Attorney General Kris Mayes has filed charges against people who created what Mayes called “ghost children” to claim voucher dollars, while spending on non-permitted items also has been and continues to be a problem there. In Utah, the state’s voucher middle-man vendor spent more than state law allowed on administrative fees and expenses, while the vendor in Idaho and Missouri has struggled to make payments on time. In Florida, investigative reporting has found voucher payments to schools that faked fire safety and facilities inspections, while in North Carolina, watchdog organizations found the state was sending voucher dollars to private schools for more students than were enrolled in those schools—and even to a school that didn’t exist!
When you stop and think for a moment the Republicans have been pushing the "fraud" in Social Security which is about 0.00625% of the annual budget! But not a peep is said about the fraud in voucher programs!
North Carolina offers an especially telling window into what is happening across this once legally segregated region where legislatures are now rapidly expanding and adopting controversial voucher-style programs.ProPublicaBy Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie SimonNov. 18, 2024,Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found.In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal survey of private schools, the most recent data available.Those 20 academies, all founded in the 1960s and 1970s, brought in more than $20 million from the state in the past three years alone. None reflected the demographics of their communities. Few even came close.Northeast Academy, a small Christian school in rural Northampton County on the Virginia border, is among them. As of the 2021-22 survey, the school’s enrollment was 99% white in a county that runs about 40% white.
Remember... school voucher programs were designed for one thing! To continue with the segregation in a way that is legally "non-discriminatory" while discriminating and to gut public education so only the white upper class gets a full education. Private school can discriminate against us, blacks, immigrants, religion, in other words anyone not like them.
