Betsy DeVos visited Douglas County before the recent election. She came, as expected, to promote vouchers. She met with a couple who had taken their child out of public school and placed him in a school for autistic children, where he is happy.
DeVos saluted their courage in seeking a different placement for their child.
But the parents are not pleased to be used as Betsy DeVos’ poster family for vouchers.
As Chalkbeat reported, the parents said they did not get a voucher for their child. The voucher would not have been much help for them. The school he attends costs $70,000 a year. The voucher, if it existed, would be worth $5,000.
“DeVos’s public words were particularly hard to take, Jennifer and Joe said, because they had met with the education secretary privately at her request. They were flattered by her interest, but felt she didn’t understand why private school vouchers would never work for them — or many other families who have children with disabilities.
“First, the dollar amount of most voucher programs is paltry compared to what it costs to pay for specialized private schools like Firefly. Tuition there is more than $70,000 a year.
“Say, there was a voucher system in place and let’s pick $5,000.” Jennifer said. “That’s not enough for placement at Firefly. It doesn’t do anything.”
“Jennifer and Joe, who own a company that sells industrial equipment, pay around half of Firefly’s tuition and their health insurance pays the rest, they said.”
With the sweeping victory of an anti-voucher slate in Douglas County, there won’t be any vouchers for the foreseeable future.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That’s why this whole argument about how “rich people have always had choices” is nonsense. The vouchers don’t cover the cost of the school. DeVos never mentions that in her pie in the sky vision of privatized education. She also insists public schools will somehow be exactly the same when she adds private school funding to the mix. It’s just misleading. If the public school loses X number of students the public school will not have the same economies of scale it currently enjoys.
The argument comparing colleges to K-12 vouchers is also ridiculous. Sure, lower income students “can” attend private colleges. But they have to borrow enough to stay in debt the rest of their adult lives. Some “choice” they have.
Wealthy people will just grab the voucher and add 30k of their own money and poor people STILL won’t have the choices they do.
Thank goodness Douglas County booted ed reformers:
“According to district staff surveys, the percent of staff who felt that the district was moving in a positive direction plummeted from 77 percent in 2007-08 to 14 percent in 2011-12 to 6 percent in 2014-15, when only 1 percent expressed confidence in the superintendent. Annual teacher turnover nearly doubled under Fagen’s tenure. And whereas 17 and 10 principals left in the two years immediately preceding Fagen’s hiring, 37 and 42 left in her last two years. Douglas County lost its “accredited with distinction” status with the Colorado Department of Education, and 11 schools were put on turnaround plans for poor performance. In 2015, the three reform board members were swept out of office by almost a 60-40 margin. And even after Fagen resigned and no board members associated with her ran for reelection, the fresh-faced reform slate just lost by about the same margin.”
They were destroying those schools.
http://educationnext.org/reflections-on-election-in-douglas-county-colorado/
While Douglas County is working hard to become well organized and to communicate to voters that there are frightening privatizing school issues at hand in their district, this is not the case in all Denver area districts. The “choice” movement continues to divide communities and close schools. Test-score teacher evaluations continue as state policy, underpinning a strategically growing teacher “shortage.”