According to the Denver Post, the Douglas County school board plans to appeal the ruling that declared vouchers unconstitutional. It will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The voucher program, which would use taxpayer money to send children to private schools, was put on hold in 2011 just as the first 304 students were about to enroll. Most planned to attend religious schools.
“The court found the program conflicts with “broad, unequivocal language forbidding the State from using public money to fund religious schools.”
“Wrote the court “… this stark constitutional provision makes one thing clear: A school district may not aid religious schools.”
The article describes the county as a “wealthy suburban district.”
School board officials promised to fight for vouchers:
“During a news conference Monday morning, Douglas County school officials indicated they likely would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case for consideration. They also said they will immediately seek a legal way to proceed with vouchers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Probably won’t go anywhere as that is definitely a state constitution issue and no abridgement of rights as delineated in the US Constitution. But hey, it’s only taxpayers monies that are going to the lawyers instead of the children. WhoTF are the board members to do so??
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How are they justifying this as for “poor kids”? Haven’t vouchers in ed reform morphed well beyond the original sales pitch already?
They’re really the masters of “mission creep” these guys. Nothing they do remains within their initial public sales presentation.
“It’ll just be charters!” “It’ll just be vouchers for poor kids!” “It’s just an experimental statewide privatization effort!”
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Not a lawyer but this will be a well-financed push to get a Supreme Court ruling. Vouchers and vaiants that lead to choice are at the center of conservative ideology. Broad and others will foot the bill.
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Vouchers are cool, if the state adequately funds basic education. If the taxpayers can’t fund basic education in public schools. Is it realistic the public can fund another 10% in the state education budget to pay for private school ed? Not likely.
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I think it could really change a place- a town, a city, a community- if most kids were going off to their separate religious schools, though.
That’s a really profound change in the US. Public schools are one of our few areas of commonality, even if they are (obviously) inequitably funded and varying in quality.
Have any of these bold cage-busting leaders considered how that kind of fragmentation might play out if it were the majority in a given area?
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Chairs, I’m glad that you’ve noted here that the public school experience can be quite different depending on where a kid lives, and I’ll note again for the record that I’m generally not a supporter of vouchers, but I think you are continuing to oversell the idea of public school as a great American commonality. Our shared values are bigger than that, and historically there’ve been some really good all-American reasons for parents NOT to send their kids to public schools.
Speaking of that, at the high-water mark of Catholic education in the late 50s-early 60s, there were 300,000 New York City children attending Catholic schools, including a surprisingly high number of non-Catholics. That wasn’t quite 50% of the school age population, but it was a sizable chunk. While there was certainly fragmentation — comparatively few Irish (especially) and Italian kids attended public schools — I’m honestly not sure whether things are less fragmented today.
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Don’t see the SCOTUS taking up a challenge to a state constitution – they’ll revisit it as tax credits instead of vouchers which I am sure is what they meant as a way to go ahead anyway.
Apparently agreeing not to collect tax money for a purpose is different than directly spending it on the same purpose even though the end result is the same.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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This isn’t just about vouchers, either.
Four days ago, the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) fined this same school district over $4 million dollars, because, according to state law, many of their high school students don’t get enough “seat time” to qualify as full-time students. Here’s a link to that story: http://co.chalkbeat.org/2015/06/25/dougco-threatens-state-in-enrollment-count-dispute/#.VZIDNO1Viko (Please note the reporter’s description of the “polemical” response the board sent the CDE.)
Several years ago, the board increased the high school teachers’ teaching time, without negotiating with the teachers or paying them more for their extra teaching load–one of the factors that led to board to terminate its agreement with the American Federation of Teachers–but, in the same move, decreased the students’ class time and offerings. All this was a cost-savings measure, even though Douglas County is the richest county in Colorado. This board refuses to try to pass a bond, believing that schools can do “more with less.” That philosophy helped lead them to the voucher program, since the board reasoned if Dougco students went to schools outside the district, the district could pocket even more money, since the voucher didn’t completely cover the per-student allocation from the state.
This district clearly is making decisions not based on what’s best for Douglas County students but to turn Douglas County into a grand experiment pushing their extremely conservative ideological agenda. Even though the county is 2/3s Republicans, these latest consequences of their actions should make even the most extreme Republicans vote to turn these ideologues out of office.
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Our district just did the same to our high school teachers. They have increased the teaching load, no extra pay, and said that if we wanted to stay with our current teaching load, they would have to fire all the elective teachers. Meanwhile, our district is paying consultants $600 per day to ….. consult. When confronted by staff on how they could continue paying exorbitant consult fees while piling on teachers, the superintendent’s response was ” That’s Title 1 money.”
So much for putting children first …
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“Justice Gregory Hobbs asked more than once about the impact on public schools. Hobbs raised concerns about “free, universal public education and its ability to survive” efforts to divert resources from it.”
Let us not witness one great bastion of America, “free, universal public education” be eroded before us.
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