Voucher foes say they have enough support to force a vote

Within the past month more than 131,000 Utahns have signed petitions to put the state's new voucher law on the ballot, shooting well past the required 92,000 for a referendum.

"This is an unprecedented outpouring of support for public education," said Pat Rusk, former Utah Education Association president and spokeswoman for the group. "When we began, the experts told us we would never be successful in an all-volunteer effort — sometimes experts are wrong."

Now county clerks have 15 days to verify the signatures. Then they'll be sent to Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert's office "to make sure everything's in order and everything matches up," according to Herbert's chief of staff, Joe Demma.

"We just grease it to go. There's not a lot of decision-making on our end," Demma said of the five days the Lieutenant Governor's Office has to review the petitions to ensure they are properly numbered.

It will be up to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to decide when voters consider the referendum. Although the governor has said he'd prefer the election be as soon as possible, he's now decided to wait for the next statewide election.

"Just because it is such an expensive process, we would prefer to do it when there's already a statewide election being held," Huntsman spokeswoman Lisa Roskelley said Monday. The price tag for a statewide election is about $3.5 million.

So instead of the late June election date initially proposed by the governor, Roskelley said the issue would not go before voters until next year. That could be Feb. 5, 2008, the date of the state's presidential primary, if lawmakers agree, or the November 2008 general election.

The referendum takes aim at the new private school voucher program referred to as the Parent Choice in Education Act. It provides Utah families with a private school tuition voucher ranging from $500 to $3,000 per student attending a private school, based on parents' income.

But that doesn't sit well with Utahns for Public Schools, who call the voucher program a scheme and say that public money should not be going to private schools.

"There is an enormous gap between the promise of vouchers and the reality," said Kim Burningham, president of the Utah State Board of Education and a member of Utahns for Public Schools, who said he has spent time examining and researching vouchers as well as talking to those involved on both sides.

"In the end I can tell you that the idea that vouchers are a magic bullet is absurd."