Karras is courting education votes

It was the endorsement that's not really an endorsement.

With the approval of GOP Gov. Olene Walker, gubernatorial candidate Nolan Karras announced Wednesday that his campaign is starting an Olene S. Walker Scholarship Fund to help needy students get a college teaching degree.

Karras said the scholarship fund is part of a 10-day tour around Utah, campaigning and asking residents how best to deal with "a near crisis" in education funding as 145,000 new students flood the public schools over the next decade and unfunded college students crowd campuses.

He will tour the state in a rented school bus, which was parked in front of Olympus High School with some of his 10 grandchildren poking their heads out of the bus windows as Karras gave the new Walker fund "its first $1,000 donation."

Walker, denied her party's re-election nomination in a May 8 GOP state convention, is not formally endorsing Karras in the Republican primary race, however. "She is honored (by the fund) but makes no endorsement," said Walker spokeswoman Amanda Covington.

Still, the fund is just the latest indication that Walker prefers Karras over the other GOP primary candidate, Jon Huntsman Jr. Karras and Huntsman face each other in the June 22 election, with the winner running against Democrat Scott Matheson Jr. in November.

In the state convention, Walker and the Utah Education Association let it be known that the governor preferred that willing delegates list Karras after Walker on the preferential ballot. And when Walker was eliminated in the voting, Karras picked up 60 percent of the first-place Walker votes, catapulting him past another candidate and into the primary.

Karras, who trails Huntsman in a Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll, said Wednesday that education is his No. 1 campaign issue and will be his top goal should he win.

However, Karras stopped short of saying he'd raise taxes to better fund public and higher education.

He even declines to recommend that a small portion of state sales tax, now dedicated to building roads and water development, be given to education instead — as both Walker and former Gov. Mike Leavitt requested of lawmakers.

And Karras recently told the newspaper that he would have signed a tuition tax credit bill that failed in the 2004 Legislature. Support of Rep. Jim Ferrin's bill is critical to many Republicans. But Walker didn't back it, and the UEA says it would "gut" public education funding by giving tax dollars critical to public schools to parents who send their children to private schools.