Senate approves bill for private school vouchers

[theaocp]

The Nevada Senate narrowly passed a bill on Wednesday paying approximately $5,000 to any family who pulls their child out of public school to attend private or home school.

Marking one of the nation's most extreme shifts toward school choice, Senate Bill 302 gives Nevada families unprecedented control over the state's taxpayer money used to educate their children. Any parent could either keep their children in public school or leave and take the state's education funding with them. The money could be used on any private school — including religiously oriented schools — or homeschooling.

Up until now, students who choose private school don't get a dime.

Under SB302, students in poverty or special education would get 100 percent of the average state education funding, while all other students would receive 90 percent. At Nevada's current funding rate to local public schools, most families would receive about $5,000 per child who opts out of public schools.

Read the rest at: http://www.rgj.com/story/news/education/2015/05/27/senate-approves-bill-private-school-vouchers/28048007/

[jwirr]

1. I do not like vouchers for schools but I will give them credit for one things - they are going to

pay !00% for special ed and poor children. One question: How are they going to monitor the use of this money to see that the children actually get what they need?

[madfloridian]

2. No, they won't be monitoring.

This will destroy public education there. Florida's done the special ed vouchers for years. Nightmare schools have opened and taken years for anyone to notice harm done.

I wrote oodles about this back in the early 2000's, hard to find the links now.

[jwirr]

4. And with special ed they may never realize there is not success. And yes, they are ruining the one

good system they have.

[Igel]

3. Oh, the problems continue.

Personally, my high school is overcrowded. If it lost the payment for each student, it would be fine. That's the *state* support, and while the total loss is going to be greater (minus the federal support for the lost ADA enrollment) costs should also go down.

Remove 30 students, remove a section of a course and all the lab equipment/supplies/bandwidth/etc. that student would consume. At some point you lose cost savings due to scale, but that only would apply to small schools.

But other problems aren't just misspent funds. What happens if a student uses all the money in a legal way--for tutoring, supplies, etc.--and then wants to re-enroll in the public school? What if the money goes to some private school, pays for the first 3 months, and come December the kid's account's broke and the parent tries to enroll him?

Who's going to audit the expenses? Is a new computer a reasonable bit of equipment? How about Internet access? Easy to run through a good chunk of the cash that way.

[jwirr]

5. Exactly and other states have already seen this kind of mismanagement. One very serious question

that I ask is: does this state even care what happens to its children? Is this just a way to abandon them?