Iowa State House District 97 Representative Ken Croken, representing Davenport residents, is holding another community forum this Saturday, Oct. 5th, at the Davenport Public Library Eastern Avenue Branch.
This forum will discuss the state's private school voucher program using public funds. The Iowa Legislature approved a voucher budget of $180 million, and with over 30,000 applicants approved for the 2024-25 school year, it equals a cost to taxpayers of $7,826 per voucher. The total cost may reach an estimated $234.7 million, $55.6 million over the original budget.
Representative Croken is inviting Lead Policy Counsel Nik Nartowicz from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State to speak with residents.
WVIK News spoke with Nartowicz before the forum. He says the idea of school vouchers is not new.
"[M]odern vouchers actually come out of the attempts to desegregate schools," Nartowicz said in a phone interview with WVIK News. "So, after Brown v. Board of Education, there was a big pushback to the idea of integrating schools. And a solution was actually to basically close down public schools. There were schools in Virginia and a couple other states that actually, the school districts just shut down their schools and created voucher programs, which allowed parents to send their kids, white parents to send their white children to all-white segregation academies and use public funding to pay for it."
According to Nartowicz, the idea of vouchers changed in the 1990s for more small-scale implementations, but over the last few years, states like Iowa moved to universal voucher programs.
"We are already seeing in some states that vouchers are blowing holes in their budgets. If you look at Arizona, the voucher program exceeded their budget amount by 1300%. And it feels inevitable to me that that's going to happen in every state that has the universal voucher program," Nartowicz said.
He mentions the vouchers may only cover a portion of the tuition costs and that state budgets now have to fund students whose parents were already paying for private education, creating a subsidy for wealthier families.
Nartowicz's biggest concern is that public education funding will dwindle to the point that some public schools may have to close.
"Rural schools are often the lifeblood of their communities. They're the biggest employer in the community," Nartowicz said. "They are a meeting place. People come together. They come for football games. They come for sporting events. People go there. It's not just the students that use the public schools. But what's going to happen is that as education budgets get smaller for public schools, that rural schools are going to suffer the most because they already have the lowest enrollment. And you're going to start seeing rural schools shutting down."
The community forum starts at 10 a.m.
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