Vouchers for schools hang by a thread

Backers and foes of school vouchers can finally agree on one thing: Douglas County School District’s first-of-its-kind school voucher program is hanging by a thread.

An anti-voucher slate of candidates was voted in by huge margins Tuesday night, buoyed by a $300,000 funding boost from the American Federation of Teachers and a nationally rooted effort to kill the program. They will move quickly to shutter it, said Pam Benigno, director of the Education Policy Center for the rightleaning Independence Institute.

“No doubt they will end the (Choice Scholarship) program and no longer defend it through the court system,” Beningno said. “No doubt the union’s prize for winning the election will be a collective bargaining agreement and national bragging rights that they killed the nation’s first local school board voucher program.”

The four candidates — Anthony Graziano, Kevin Leung, Krista Holtzmann and Chris Schor — all vowed to end for good the district’s efforts to allow Douglas County families to use tax dollars to attend participating private schools approved by the district.

“I think we’ve made our position pretty clear on this, that we don’t want public dollars going toward a private education,” Holtzmann said. “I don’t see any reason why we will take a whole lot of time making a decision to end this program.

“We have other pressing things to do.”

That includes addressing $300 million in estimated repairs and upgrades to the district’s schools and repairing a fractured relationship with teachers.

“It’s time to return our attention locally — to the students, teachers and community of all Douglas County public schools — while restoring fiscal responsibility,” Graziano said.

But cutting ties with the controversial program, which began in 2011 by a conservative school board, won’t be so easy, voucher backers say.

The Douglas County school district and the school board are all defendants in a lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court sent back to the state Supreme Court earlier this year to reconsider the constitutional merits of the voucher program.

So, as defendants, it is not the district’s case to end, said Michael Bindas, senior attorney for the Virginia-based religious freedom group Institute for Justice.

“Because the Board of Education is the defendant and not the plaintiff, they can’t unilaterally end this case,” Bindas said.

The institute intervened on behalf of a group of parents who were going to take advantage of the vouchers when the district was sued by Taxpayers for Public Education. The program allowed up to 500 students a year to receive scholarships worth $6,100 — or 65 percent of the district’s per-pupil spending — to attend a private school.

It was the nation’s first and only voucher program created, administered and funded by a school district. All other voucher programs are approved, operated and funded by state legislatures, voucher supporters say.

But opponents say the Douglas program funds private religious schools at the expense of public schools. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled the program unconstitutional in 2015. That paved the way for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent it back to the state’s highest court.

“So the case is very much alive and we will continue to fight for it … to remove the barriers of education choice in Colorado,” Bindas said.

Denver District Judge Michael Martinez halted the voucher program in 2011. While the new Board of Education has the power to rescind it entirely, a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court could make the issue moot, said William Trachman, the school board’s legal counsel.

The district, meanwhile, will continue to fund the litigation through private funds until the new board says otherwise, Trachman said.

Tuesday’s vote will not derail voucher and school-choice programs nationwide, added Bindas, whose firm specializes in defending voucher programs. At least 30 states have voucher-type programs in place, and their popularity is growing, he said.

“The Douglas County vote, although unfortunate, will do absolutely nothing to impede the school-choice movement,” he said.

No one should draw conclusions from the Douglas results, agreed Matt Cook, director of public policy and advocacy for the Colorado Association of School Boards. “All sides were trying to say this was some kind of bellwether for the rest of the nation. But if this had been another school district in another state, the results could have been different. It’s all hard to say.”

Florence Doyle was one of the first Douglas County parents to enroll in the voucher program in hopes of putting her twins in Regis Jesuit High School in Denver. But the program was halted before her family could use the funds.

Her family had nothing against Douglas schools, Doyle said. But she and her husband wanted her kids to enjoy the multicultural aspects of Regis while absorbing the Catholic structure of the school.

“It wasn’t because we wanted to damage Douglas County, but we wanted our kids to enjoy getting the benefits of going someplace else,” she said.