The answer to increased school choice is NOT voucher schools.
The answer is CHARTER SCHOOLS.
Remember - A voucher school which honors its stewardship of the public trust is known as a CHARTER SCHOOL!
100 Unintended Consequences of House Bill 148 – “Education Vouchers”
The answer – operate as a CHARTER SCHOOL.
1. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could grant enrollment preference to a student based on socioeconomic status.
2. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could expel a student if they do not achieve a certain minimum score on a standardized test.
3. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could reject a student if the student does not achieve a minimum score on a pre-assessment as determined or created by the school’s owners.
4. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could reject a student if they have a specific medical condition, such as ADHD or childhood depression.
5. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could reject a student based on their height, weight, or physical ability.
6. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could deny a student enrollment if the student has a learning disability.
7. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could remove a student the owners or an influential donor do not like.
8. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could expel a student to make room for another student whose parents make a large donation to the school.
9. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could grant enrollment preference to a student based on proximity to the school.
10. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could immediately expel a student with or without cause without specifying the reason and without due process of any kind.
11. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require family-funded extracurricular activities or out-of-state school trips as a requirement for enrollment.
12. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require that parents earn a minimum income, such as $100,000 per year, prior to accepting their children.
13. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require that parents submit to a credit check and require parents to pay for it.
14. With your tax dollars, a voucher school which becomes dependent on voucher funds and then receives a reduction in funds due to legislative action in an economic downturn can require the difference to be paid for by the parents, placing a significant unforeseen burden on families with tight budgets.
15. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could auction or sell open seats to the highest bidder.
16. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could hire unlicensed or unqualified teachers.
17. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require teachers to sign a loyalty oath, forbidding them from discussing school operations or face financial penalties and/or termination.
18. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could remove a teacher without notice and for absolutely no reason.
19. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could force teachers to sign non-compete agreements, banning them from teaching at another school in the area should they choose to leave.
20. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could teach students specific religious philosophies.
21. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could teach that members of other races or religions are inferior.
22. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could sell religious books, videos, or software directly to students at significant markup, with the inventory of such materials to be paid for by voucher funds.
23. With your tax dollars, voucher schools could require students to make denominational pledges of allegiance (e.g., “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag”) and expel students who refuse.
24. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could expel a child for refusing to pray.
25. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could advocate specific ideologies such as socialism or communism.
26. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could leave your children unattended without supervision.
27. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could operate in a building that is unsafe in an earthquake.
28. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could hire convicted felons.
29. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could be operated by convicted felons.
30. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could allow teachers to keep alcoholic beverages on campus.
31. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could allow children to browse the web without an Internet filter.
32. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could deny parents the ability to conference with teachers or the principal.
33. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could hold every single board meeting closed to the public.
34. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could deny access to all visitors, including district and state officials as well as the parents themselves.
35. With your tax dollars, a voucher school’s parents could be banned from meeting the owners of the school or even knowing who the owners are.
36. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could mandate that all disputes be resolved with binding arbitration.
37. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could deny all GRAMA requests made by parents or state officials as they are not subject to Utah sunshine laws.
38. With your tax dollars, voucher schools will force legislators to appropriate additional money not covered by this bill to provide for oversight costs already being encountered in other voucher implementations such as Florida or Milwaukee.
39. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could change its mission or focus with absolutely no input or discussion from parents or teachers. If the parents don’t like it their only recourse is to “vote with their feet” and leave.
40. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could open next door to a traditional or public charter school without informing the school or sharing enrollment information of any kind.
41. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could open next door to a traditional or public charter school, starving it of students and forcing changes to boundaries or causing the school to close.
42. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could hold classes for significantly fewer days per year (60 days/year, for example) and still receive full voucher funding.
43. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could spend your money to defend itself against a lawsuit brought upon it by the state that provided the money in the first place.
44. With your tax dollars, voucher schools will grow, not shrink, the size of government as families with students currently in private schools inevitably lobby to obtain voucher funds.
45. With your tax dollars, voucher schools who become dependent on voucher funds will exercise enormous political pressure to maintain a steady stream of funds, even in times of economic downturn.
46. With your tax dollars, voucher schools place a significantly greater burden on small school districts whose economies of scale cannot match those of larger districts.
47. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could bribe parents by offering them a partial refund of their voucher as a “signing bonus.”
48. With your tax dollars, voucher schools will be able to issue an annual norm-referenced test that cannot be accurately compared to public school norm-referenced tests, thus making claims of voucher performance gains difficult or impossible to substantiate.
49. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require a severely strict uniform and could demand that families purchase uniforms from specific suppliers, including the owners themselves, at any price.
50. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could use spanking to discipline children.
51. With your tax dollars, a voucher school with multiple campuses could require students to move from one campus to another, without regard to the burden on the families affected.
52. With your tax dollars, a voucher school is not required to teach civic and character education deemed essential by the legislature as “fundamental elements of the constitutional responsibility of public education.”
53. With your tax dollars, a political party could operate and maintain a voucher school.
54. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could endorse specific political candidates.
55. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require that parents are members of a specific political party or contribute to a particular political action committee prior to enrolling their children.
56. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could allow political candidates to pass out literature paid for by the school on campus.
57. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could pay for and/or post political lawn signs on school property.
58. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could ask for donations for political candidates.
59. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could host a political rally for a political candidate during regular school hours.
60. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could donate to political action committees.
61. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could pay for robocalls or television ads for a political candidate.
62. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could hire lobbyists to advocate for specific legislation.
63. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could close without notice, leaving local districts to reabsorb the students without reimbursement.
64. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could be mismanaged, go bankrupt and close its doors with the state never getting the voucher funds back.
65. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could relocate, perhaps multiple times per year, without any input whatsoever from parents or staff.
66. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could operate for one year in a low-income area, obtain voucher funds, purchase curriculum materials, desks, and computers, then close its doors and relocate to an affluent area the next year with new students.
67. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could obtain scholarship payments, close the business without notice at the end of a quarter and liquidate the company with absolutely no legal recourse.
68. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could hold large fundraisers and then close their doors immediately after the fundraiser with absolutely no recourse or notice.
69. With your tax dollars, a voucher school that becomes dependent on voucher funds to subsidize their operation will go out of business if future regulations invalidate the school from receiving vouchers.
70. With your tax dollars, a voucher school in financial distress could cut back on the number of students attending the school, “laying off” large numbers of students and/or cutting staff and raising classroom size to make ends meet.
71. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could spend public money at the owner’s sole discretion with absolutely no transparency and without being subject to an audit.
72. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could charge students any fee it likes for lunch.
73. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could have vending machines full of pop and junk food, with all of the proceeds going to the owners.
74. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require all supplies, books, and materials to be fees that fall outside of the normal tuition subsidized by the voucher.
75. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could raise its rates at any time for any reason and require the difference to be paid for by the parents or face expulsion.
76. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could charge more for voucher students than it would for students who do not have a voucher.
77. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could increase tuition until only those who could have afforded the school without the voucher could attend.
78. With your tax dollars, a voucher could be applied to a program in which the students meet at a facility and interact with a single teacher for only a few hours each week.
79. With your tax dollars, a voucher school’s owners could appeal to parents to donate to pay off the building (in the name of helping the kids), then close its doors and sell the building without notice and with no recourse.
80. With your tax dollars, a voucher school as a for-profit enterprise could retain significant revenue obtained by voucher funds to enrich themselves rather than directing the funds to the students.
81. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could enter into vendor relationships with friends or relatives for any amount and with absolutely no transparency to the public.
82. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could require a parent to sign up for a multiple-year contract in exchange for a tuition reduction, with significant early-exit penalties.
83. With your tax dollars, a voucher school’s owners could pay themselves or a relative, such as a son or daughter, far more for the same job than they would other employees, with absolutely no transparency to the public.
84. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could set classroom size to be as high as the owners could get away with.
85. With your tax dollars, a voucher school can ask teachers who already receive free enrollment for their children to redeem their vouchers anyway, thus creating an additional cost to the public.
86. With your tax dollars, a voucher school can ask teachers who already receive free enrollment for their children to redeem their vouchers and then give it back to them as a free perk on the public’s nickel.
87. With your tax dollars, a home-school network with as few as 41 students could rent a small location, meet there once/week, and obtain full voucher funding.
88. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could sell merchandise to children on campus.
89. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could invite vendors to sell merchandise on campus and retain a kickback in exchange.
90. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could force children to participate in fundraising activities during school time and on school property.
91. With your tax dollars, a voucher high school could invite selected private higher education institutions to recruit the high school students, receiving a kickback for each student enrolled.
92. With your tax dollars, a voucher network could hold a portion of the student’s voucher in an account to be paid back as a scholarship to the student only if they attend a higher education institution owned by the voucher network.
93. With your tax dollars, a voucher school could sell curriculum materials to students at a significant markup to enrich the owners.
94. With your tax dollars, a charter school could close and convert to a voucher school, expelling all students and re-admitting only those students the owners decide to retain.
95. With your tax dollars, a charter school in trouble with the state could close its doors and convert to a voucher school, leaving concerns and pending investigations completely unresolved.
96. With your tax dollars, a charter elementary school’s owners could expand its campus to include a for-profit middle school and grant enrollment preference to elementary students of the public charter.
97. With your tax dollars, voucher schools can place private schools that refuse the conditions of the voucher at an insurmountable economic and competitive disadvantage.
98. With your tax dollars, voucher schools will encourage homeschoolers and existing private school families to exercise significant political pressure to obtain voucher funds for themselves.
99. With your tax dollars, unqualified owners or opportunistic entrepreneurs can create situations demanding further regulation. These regulations may unwittingly invalidate above-board private schools from obtaining voucher funds, thus placing them at a significant economic disadvantage and possibly putting them out of business.
100. With your tax dollars, a voucher school’s owners will be faced every day with a continual dilemma – is the first priority of a for-profit enterprise that is given public funds to promote one’s self-interest or to further the public good?
Submitted by Craig Johnson
