Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Education:

Voucher battle brewing: Private-school parents say they deserve state funds

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Nevada Treasurer Dan Schwartz testifies in committee at the Legislative Building in Carson City on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015.

Nevada’s landmark school choice bill has its share of fans.

More than 3,000 families have already applied for the program in just a few months of open enrollment. If they qualify, they could be eligible to receive around $5,000 in state money to spend on things like private school tuition and tutoring.

But there’s one group that isn’t so thrilled: parents of current private school students.

They were unsuccessful in trying to persuade state Treasurer Dan Schwartz to eliminate what has come to be called the “100 Day Rule,” which states that families are only eligible for an educational savings account if the student spent 100 days in a public school before filing the application.

The rule, which was included in the original law passed by the Legislature, effectively excludes many current private school families from being able to qualify for the program. As a result, some private school administrators are looking to the 2017 Legislature as the next step to changing the rule.

“It has to be,” said Catherine Thompson, superintendent of the Las Vegas Catholic Diocese schools, which educate around 3,900 students in the valley each year.

“We understand that nothing can be changed until the next Legislature,” she said. “So we will be there.”

It’s shaping up to be yet another battle in what has become a political war over the fate and future of Nevada’s ESA program, the most far-reaching of its kind ever enacted in the U.S.

Many in the private school community feel the rule discriminates against families that have already put their kids in private school, and the resentment has only grown as the treasurer’s office has drawn up regulations for the program.

Last week, Schwartz announced that the program would be expanded to include military families and parents who have children going into kindergarten, but that the 100-day rule would remain in place.

“I think it’s biased against families that have already sacrificed and saved to send their students to private school,” said Steven Buuck, CEO of Summerlin's Faith Lutheran, Nevada’s largest private school. “I would do whatever I could [to remove the rule].”

The next Legislature is still a long way off, and opponents of the 100-day rule have yet to organize any kind of concerted movement. But if they do, they face an uphill battle, said Seth Rau, policy director for education think-tank Nevada Succeeds.

“They have to have a way to pay for it,” he said. “They’re going to have to find a way to effectively raise $90 to $100 million a year.”

That’s because students in private schools are not counted in the public school system, which means the state doesn’t set aside the funds to educate them. So if their parents were allowed to receive money through an education savings account, that money would essentially have to be taken from existing students.

That brings up the issue of taxes, and money was the reason that ESA champion Republican state Sen. Scott Hammond inserted the rule into the legislation in the first place. Allowing current parents of private school students to qualify for an education savings account would blow a hole in the state budget millions of dollars wide.

“If they come to the table without a tax plan, no one’s going to take them seriously,” Rau said.

And there’s no guarantee there will be any political will to change the policy in two years, when Democrats are poised to make big gains in the Legislature.

Looming on the horizon is the biggest battle of them all. Two lawsuits, one filed by a group of parents and another by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, could spell the end of Nevada’s ESA program before any money is doled out as early as next February.

“Who knows what the state of the ESA will be in 2016?” Rau said. “If anybody says they know, they’re lying.”

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