State-funded tuition may mean 14,000 transfers to private institutions

The Columbus Dispatch

11/13/2005

By Jennifer Smith Richards

The Columbus Dispatch

Waiter, the gentleman will try the charter school. The lady would like to try a private school, please. Order whatever you want; the state’s picking up the tab. For parents, selecting a school next year might be like ordering off a menu. And that menu will expand as early as March, when private schools decide whether they’d like to welcome students who use new school vouchers.

The rules for the hotly debated program, which will give students in certain struggling schools money to attend private ones, will make an initial appearance before the State Board of Education on Tuesday. A public hearing and a state administrative review follow so that, by February, final rules for using the new Ohio EdChoice vouchers will be in place.

“Most of the conversation in Columbus has been about charters, not about vouchers. We need to get this (vouchers) fixed in people’s minds,” said Mark Real, who has studied school-choice trends. He is executive director of KidsOhio.org.

He said the voucher system is “potentially a more-attractive option for some families.”

Next school year, 14,000 vouchers will be offered to students in 52 schools statewide that failed to improve at reading or math for three consecutive years. More than 40 percent of the failing schools are in Columbus. Sixteen of the 23 Columbus voucher-eligible schools are elementaries; seven are middle schools.

Columbus Public Schools officials, who are formulating a round of school closings, said it’s difficult to know what kind of impact another layer of school choice will have.

“There’s still a lot of what-if questions being posed,” said district spokesman Greg Viebranz. “The greatest impact is the uncertainty of how it will affect our budget and trying to plan for that.”

The pilot voucher program, limited to Cleveland for nine years, has been particularly popular with parents the past two years, when about 1,200 students were turned away each year and placed on waiting lists.

The missing link in the new, expanded program is how many private schools will want to set aside spots for voucher students.

“We do understand that the participation in this program by students is largely dependent on the capacity of the nonpublics,” said Kimberly Murnieks, chief program officer for Ohio EdChoice at the Ohio Department of Education. The department will begin gauging the interest of private schools next month.

Religious and other private-school groups that have weighed in on the rules for the vouchers said how much room individual schools have could determine whether they are interested in participating.

“We’re looking at how many nonpublic schools are within commuting distance . . . and beginning to map voucher-eligible schools and surrounding nonpublics,” said Carolyn M. Jurkowitz, associate director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio.

Officials with the Ohio Education Association, Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio School Boards Association said they had not seen the draft rules, but plan to weigh in now.

According to the rules, the 8,000 Columbus public school students eligible for the vouchers must be enrolled in a school that has been labeled an “academic emergency” school for at least three consecutive years.

Students must be attending a voucher-eligible school. Also, children who would be entering kindergarten in a voucher-eligible school the next year can apply to go directly to a private school.

Students in charter schools that have failed to make enough annual progress in reading and math for three years also are eligible.

Priority will be given to the poorest students.

As long as students don’t have more than 20 unexcused absences at the new private school, take the required state tests, and don’t move out of the school district they attended when they were awarded the voucher, they can keep going to the private school until they graduate. Even if they flunk out or are expelled, they can transfer their vouchers to a new private school as long as one will take them. Rules for the private schools accepting vouchers are equally simple: Give tests. Keep good records. Be open to inspections by the state Education Department. Some private schools have objected to a requirement that they give poor parents a chance to work off the difference between the voucher amount – $4,250 for elementary and middle school students and $5,000 for high school students – and the actual private-school tuition by participating in school-related service projects.

It was unclear whether widespread parent interest in the state-funded private-school tuition will hurt charter schools, which have drawn 7,000 students who otherwise would be attending Columbus Public Schools.

However, Columbus Public is certain to feel a greater pinch, Real said.

“I think the fair thing to say is it’ll hurt underperforming schools – charter or traditional public schools,” he said. “It’s yet another form of competition.”

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com

Copyright © 2005, The Columbus Dispatch