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Wednesday, November 22, 2023

WY: Voucher Bill Advances

Attempts have been made to sell a school voucher bill in the Wyoming legislature, like the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship Act  (because "scholarship" and "freedom" are more popular terms than "voucher") earlier this year, but they have all failed. Now a new variation on the theme is aiming at a place on the 2024 schedule.

Oddly enough, the bill comes from Speaker of the House Albert Sommers, a Republican who actually helped block the Freedom Scholarship Act. But he thinks this alternate form will work better. Opponents disagree. Actually, some supporters disagreed, too-- State Senator Bo Biteman said this new version was too watered down and was a "crap sandwich," and so, as we'll see, GOP reps managed to un-water the bill.

Some key features.

The bill runs on $40 million taken from the general fund. Of that $40 million, $12 million (30%) goes to fund preschool education. Because if there's one technique that voucher proponents have learned, it's to team up your unpopular voucher plan with something that people want. 

The rest of the funding would go to ESA vouchers.

The bill uses the usual foot-in-the-door feature of an income cap for receiving the vouchers. This bill sets the cap at 250% of federal poverty limit, which adds up to $75,000 for a family of four. Median household income in Wyoming is $68,000. One legislator unsuccessfully tried to boost this up to 350% ($105K). At this point, nobody should be fooled by the "we're just doing this to rescue the poor kids" line, as we have seen multiple states modify their program with ever-increasing caps or simply getting rid of the cap entirely. 

With that expansion of eligibility, we keep seeing voucher program costs explode to budget-busting extremes.

Voucher amount would be up to $5,000. According to the website Private School Review, average private school tuition in Wyoming is $8,719 per year. 

In one feature that is not common to voucher laws, the bill proposes that the Department of Education would certify vendors eligible to be paid with the taxpayer-funded vouchers. (That was not part of the Freedom Scholarship Act.)  But a legislator successfully added an amendment, typical of current voucher law, that the state can't interfere with the private school's curriculum or admission policies, meaning that the school could teach religion, flat earth science, creationism, and racial supremacy if it so desired, as well as discriminating against whatever applicants it so desired. 

In practice, what that means is that religious schools can accept vouchers while offering religious indoctrination and religion-based discrimination (e.g. the Illinois voucher school that requires families to be born-again Christians)

And another legislator successfully stripped the portion of the bill that voucher-using students had to take the same state tests as public school students. Rep. Karlee Provenza pretty well captured what all these changes mean.

“When we remove that testing standard, we are moving away from saying is government money being well spent?” Provenza said. “We’re not regulating choice, we’re regulating accountability of our state funds.”

True enough, but current voucher theory says that a voucher bill isn't non-crappy unless it's stripped of accountability and oversight. So if Wyoming is going to have school vouchers, they should be as unaccountable and unregulated as possible. Kiss those dollars goodbye, taxpayers, and don't ask where they went or how effectively they were spent. Freedom!

The bill will still have to clear some hurdles, including a state constitution that prohibits the use of “any portion of any public school fund” for private schools (Article 7, Section 8).

Wyoming voucher advocates have struggled with this, and the argument seems to boil down to:

1) Once we hand the money over to the parents, it is transformed into private money and so there's no problem!

2) The Supreme Court thinks public money should absolutely finance the exercise of religion, so if this makes it all the way to SCOTUS, they will be on our side.

So we'll see. There are unique features to a voucher initiative in Wyoming. For one, funding vouchers by having "the money follow the child" would never fly, because Wyoming schools have wildly different per pupil costs. In 2019-2020, Laramie #1 spent $14,582 per student, but the very rural Sheridan district (90 students) spent $41,176 per student. That means Wyoming is better inclined to fund vouchers separately from public education. They could, in fact, be the first legislature to be honest and say, "We believe in choice so much that we are going to raise your taxes to fund it." 

For another, there's that state constitution, exactly the same sort of challenge that sank a voucher proposal in Kentucky.

The Wyoming Education Association's government relations director Tate Mullen told legislators that WEA's “independent analysis determines that there’s no defensible argument that could be made to support the claim that the bill is consistent with the provisions of our state constitution.” But the current state education head honcho thinks its just swell. 

The bill was passed by the Legislature's Joint Education Committee and so should be on the menu for the 2024 session. Folks on both sides have a chance to limber up their arguments. Stay tuned.

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