Is another expansion of vouchers on the way?
For a brief — really brief — glimmer of a moment, I hoped that Senate President Steve Yarbrough had seen the light.
That he’d realized that our leaders’ ongoing drive to divert ever-larger chunks of state tax money to private and parochial schools was a bad idea, given our inability to properly fund the public schools that most of Arizona's children attend.
That Yarbrough — having now retired from running a student tuition organization that handled publicly funded private-school scholarships — had realized the insanity of allowing an automatic 20 percent annual increase in the amount that corporations can divert from their state income-tax bills to fund those scholarships. Eh, wrong.
Turns out Yarbrough’s not really trying to cap the tuition tax-credit program he ushered into existence a decade ago and has zealously protected since then.
He’s just working on yet another plan to expand the state’s voucher program. This time, to give away public money to kids already in private school.
And so comes the trade-off in House Bill 1467:
Yarbrough is proposing to reduce the 20 percent annual growth in corporate tuition tax credits, provided the Legislature eliminate the requirement that kids have to be in public school in order to score a publicly funded Empowerment Scholarship Account (read: voucher).
That’s a deal for suckers, and here are two big reasons why:
1. That 20 percent growth in corporate tuition tax credits is doomed anyway. Years of tax cuts have relieved corporations of the burden of having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. If you don’t pay taxes, it stands you reason you can’t make use of tax credits. Thus, our leaders’ insistence on cutting taxes has already capped the tuition tax-credit program.
2. This plan does away with the requirement that kids go to public school before they can qualify for a voucher and be given funds to get out
of public school. Under this bill, ESAs could be given to certain students who aren’t, and perhaps never have been, in public schools.
The public wasn’t paying for their education before, but we would be now.
For years, our leaders have billed the ESA program as a savings to taxpayers, because vouchers are generally worth only 90 percent of what we pay to fund public schools.
But if a child hasn’t been in public school, our share of the tab has been zero. Now it could average up to $25,000 a student, if that child is disabled. Or about $2 million by 2021, according to legislative budget analysts.
Under Yarbrough’s bill, certain students who now attend private school with help from a tuition tax-credit scholarship could immediately switch over to an ESA, nearly tripling the amount of public money they could score to pay their private-school tuition.
The proposal, which already has passed the Senate, would apply only to special-needs students, foster children and certain low-income children.
Just as the original ESA program applied only to special-needs children. Then it was expanded, and expanded, and expanded. And finally, last year, expanded once more, to include all 1.1 million Arizona public-school children — though voters this fall will ultimately decide on that last expansion via Proposition 305.
Now our leaders want to expand vouchers yet again — this time to pick up the tab for kids not even in public schools.
This, as public schools are still wondering what happened to $1 billion of the $1.5 billion in state funding they lost due to budget cuts during the Great Recession. Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts @arizonarepublic.com.