Regional school systems gathered Monday to hold press conferences on separate sides of House Bill 205, which seeks to establish a private school scholarship tax credit program. While private schools like Owensboro Catholic are on board with the bill and its potential benefit to low-income students, Daviess County Public Schools and Owensboro Public Schools oppose the bill, calling it a back-door voucher program.
Kentucky House Bill 205 was introduced in the Kentucky House of Representatives on Feb. 5, and its primary purpose is allowing donors who make contributions to private schools to claim large tax breaks for giving to scholarship groups. The bill serves as a tuition assistance program for students wishing to attend private schools, which are largely funded through donations and tuition costs rather than state and federal funding.
The bill states that those who donate to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations should receive a 95 percent tax break based on their donated contributions, with a $1 million cap. Individual citizens and businesses who support scholarship-granting organizations would receive a nonrefundable state tax credit in return for their donations. Scholarship awards would be limited to $25 million for the 2020 fiscal year.
In a press conference addressing HB 205, DCPS Superintendent Matt Robbins and OPS Superintendent Nick Brake gathered with seven other superintendents from around the region. According to officials, this was one of several press conferences across Kentucky Monday held by superintendents representing large regions of the state.
“HB 205 from our perspective is not an argument against parent or guardian choice or those who want to donate money toward scholarships,” Robbins said. “It is an argument for adequate funding for public schools as mandated in the Kentucky constitution. It is an argument for giving more state and general fund dollars away when our public schools and our districts are woefully underfunded.”
Kentucky currently ranks third in states with the deepest cuts to K-12 education from 2008 – 2017. Kentucky currently does not provide funding for textbooks, instructional materials or teacher training and will not for the next academic year. Transportation costs to the district are only reimbursed by the state at 58 percent and no money will be allocated to implement SB 1, which requires adequate measures for school safety. The state also only funds a half day of kindergarten and preschool, despite most districts offering all-day programs.
“I’ll just be blunt,” Brake said. “This is a voucher bill. This is a bill that will redirect public dollars to private sources. Public schools in Kentucky are not currently funded adequately as it is, so any redirecting of those public dollars will diminish and create even greater funding inadequacies in our state.”
According to Owensboro Catholic Schools (OCS) President Tom Lilly, this bill helps everyone.
“It does not reduce any dollars to the public school system, it just serves more children,” Lilly said.
Catholic officials said it comes down to choice. HB 205 will allow parents to choose where they want their children to be educated, specifically lower income families. Tuition at OCS is determined on a sliding scale based on income, but families pay somewhere between $5,000 to $8,000 annually. OCS Assistant Superintendent David Kessler said the bill will allow 7,000 students to move from public to private school, which equates to less than one percent of the 650,000 Kentucky students in public school.
One of the main points being confused, Catholic officials said, is the difference between a tax credit and a voucher.
Owensboro Catholic Middle School Principal Sara Guth said she is from Indiana, where a voucher system is in place. According to Guth, Indiana gives a voucher, or a portion of funding for a child’s education, to parents to send their children to a private school. Guth said HB 205 does not follow this same method. Guth said Kentucky lawmakers are proposing that donations to private schools by businesses or individuals become incentivized with a tax credit. The donated money will then be put into a pool managed by a scholarship-granting organization, which will then determine a students’ needs based on household income.
Guth said that donations will not be able to be directed to one school, rather a scholarship-granting organization that then dispenses money to several schools.
The Catholic Diocese of Owensboro oversees 17 schools, and according to Superintendent Ann Flaherty, a handful of others would be considered accredited in western Kentucky to be eligible for HB 205.
“That’s maybe 20 schools across half the state of Kentucky,” Flaherty said. “So there’s not going to be a huge impact. The money is not going to be pulled from the state treasury, the money is not coming from the state at all. It’s coming from corporations and individuals that want to donate so that parents can have choice for their child.”
Flaherty said there could be only one scholarship-granting organization in western Kentucky to allocate funds to those 20 or more schools.
Currently, all contributions OCS receives are managed by FACTS, a third-party company that offers a tuition management and financial needs assessment, which takes the decision out of the hands of the private school system.
Public school officials expressed concerns beyond the voucher debate. If passed, superintendents believe the bill would be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional, costing the state an estimated $50 million in lawsuits. Superintendents also said that it’s a myth that when a student leaves the public school system it saves the district money. Fixed costs like building and bus maintenance, as well as utility and custodial costs remain the same, they said. Superintendent Kyle Estes of Hancock County Schools said because the bill allows for “cherry picking” by educational institutions, students that are more expensive to educate will remain in public schools with fewer resources and less funding.
While OCS officials believe HB 205 will bring diversity to their schools, attracting more Hispanic, Burmese and special needs students, public schools officials said HB 205 will bring inequality.
“In looking at states where they have done this sort of thing and you have seen consistent underfunding of public schools and the introduction of vouchers, you have extreme inequality that begins to be created,” Brake said. “In a district like the Owensboro City Schools, we deal with that anyway. That continued inequity, that continued level of inequality is a concern for not just our school district, but our community and the competitiveness of our state.”
