Voucher foes hail big petition win

Voucher opponents were claiming a big win Monday, with the announcement that Utahns for Public Schools have collected enough signatures to put the voucher law on the ballot.

Within the past month more than 131,000 Utahns signed petitions to take the state's new voucher law to voters, 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."

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

It will then be up to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to decide when voters consider the referendum.

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 the parents' income.

But that doesn't sit well with Utahns for Public Schools, which calls the voucher program a scheme and says that public money should not be going to private schools. The group, made up of state education leaders and UEA and PTA members and the NAACP among others, filed for the referendum last month.

"Many of us have worked for years to overcome the river of money from out-of-state ideologues intent on starting a voucher experiment in Utah," Rusk said. "To us this makes no sense for Utah where 96 percent of Utah students attend public schools and 21 Utah counties have no private schools at all."

"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."

The announcement came as no surprise to the pro-voucher group Parents for Choice in Education.

"We expected this — when you have the UEA and then the PTA, which is just another name for the UEA, and thousands of public employees ... really I am surprised that they didn't just get it by crossing the living room and saying 'Here, sign this,"' PCE spokeswoman Nancy Pomeroy said.