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Vouchers a win-win, Eyre says

The more I hear from Eyre, the more I wonder where he came up with his incorrect interpretation on how we fund Public Education.

When a child chooses not to attend a Public school, not a single dollar goes to that school. We have such set costs that if enrollment dips under a certain number of students, schools must cut FTE (Full Time Educators) in order to be fiscally solvent which happens to be required by State Law.

Even in the Eyre commercial, Mrs. Eyre mentioned how the seven Oreo cookies were not enough. If they fully realized that not a single cookie remained in the Public school, and as a few students pull out of lower enrollment schools that classes will be required by law to be doubled up, then they might be whistling a different tune.

A real Utah example is Liberty Academy. Our enrollment was way short and our budget required extensive cuts. If the cookies really remained at the school, I and fourteen others would be teaching small class sizes of ten to fifteen students. Our system isn't funded so simply as the Oreo cookie analogy, and we need realistic fixes to improve funding.

If the bill is so bad, why did the Senate, House and Governor pass it and does the Governor still support it???
Mr. Jarvis did you work for Liberty Academy. It sounds like you did; so, it also sounds like what you are explaining happened in the past. Mr. Eyre is talking about the future with the Voucher system.
Why shouldn't parents be able to make the choice?(Especially those who are not rich and can't afford currently to send their children to a private school.)

I'll tell Brad why most of the politicians are supposingly supporting vouchers, they are benefiting. A parallel is our tax system. Who can hide their money while the lower middle class pays for the majority. Mr. Eyre's fuzzy oreo math does not add up. Such as, who pays for the rest of a poor persons private school tuition past the $3000. I doubt that I could get much of a voucher because I am the lower middle class and cannot afford to send my kid to private school with or without the voucher. Why should Joe taxpayer pay for a wealthier persons ($500) kid to go to private school? Like any bill, the vouchers supporters do not explain to the public the realistic math beyond oreos.

Mr. Jarvis, please ,please, PLEASE read the bill, as it was passed. Your questions will be ansswered. Take the time to educate yourself, as well as your students.

Taxing parents for schooling is taxation without representation. When parents decide that their children need something different than what the schools are offering their tax money still goes somewhere into the school system. That's what my taxes tell me. I still pay school tax whether or not I have children and whether they go to public school or not. So, if a child does not go to public school and does not get a voucher to fund another type of schooling, who is pocketing my tax dollars and for what??? I vote vouchers. It seems to keep my tax dollars a little less under the table than they are at present and my children will have a better chance at the education I want them to have.

Steven Jarvis is correct!
The money per student will not stay in the school!
The funding is based on enrollment if enrollment goes down so does funding! Think about it!

The $7000 per student is made up on both fixed and variable costs. The fixed costs of a school do not go down by removing students...so no money is "saved" in fixed costs. The school power bill might be an example of fixed costs. No matter if 30 students are in the classroom or 10 studens, the classroom still needs heat and light...so that part of the $7,000 is fixed and does not go down.

I have never heard anyone state what the ACTUAL cost reduction to the school is when students leave. Only a fool would believe that if a student dropped out of a school that school would actually have $7,000 more. If I move out of state and my kid no longer goes to school do the schools total expenses go down $7,000....NO!

I believe the largest part of the money is fixed expenses. As far as class size getting smaller...no way, they just reduce the number of teachers as the student-teacher ratio is fixed...fewer students will mean fewer teachers.

As a teacher, I see there is no simple way to weigh the pros and cons of the costs, and the media is doing no better than both sides in explaining the big picture.

BUT here is WHAT'S IMPORTANT:
It's not about dollars.
It's about a few kids in my class every year, who ought to be somewhere else.

We are wasting precious public school dollars and precious time of most kids in any crowded class, trying to treat all kids alike.
Some are way ahead and some are behind.

Vouchers will make a positive step toward better schools, just because some families will be able to get their kid out of my room and let me do a better job with the majority!!

To me, it's simple. Do I want my taxes to go to the public good or do I want them to be used as an entitlement to a select few so they can finance a "choice" they can already make. I want my taxes to go to the public good which means to public schools. I do not want to finance an experiment in education that seems to benefit the rich more then the poor (inspite of the pro-voucher arguements about how the poor will be helped, yea right, but not into the best private schools only ones that spend less per pupil then public schools). The legislature passed the bill and the governor signed it because they didn't care what the people thought. With referendum 1, they are going to find out what the people think. I'm voting NO on referendum 1 because I care about public schools and about the whole of our society, not just the select, elite few. I also don't believe the agenda of Benson or Eyre when they support vouchers. I don't believe their motives are pure.

Here are my thoughts: having 50 different states with 50 different legislatures gives our country an unusual opportunity to experiment with new laws. Examples include "no-fault" insurance, a concept that began in Michigan in the late 1960s, and limited liability companies, a concept adopted by the Wyoming legislature in the 1980s. Both were experiments by one state's legislature that have now become common practice in other estates. Various state have also adopted numberous laws over the years that have proven to be failures. But, nevertheless, they gave their ideas a try and found out whether the ideas worked only after trying them. To my knowledge, no other state has ever tried a voucher system quite like this one. I would like to give it a try to see how it works. I see no downside to trying it.

I think we need to include home schooled kids in this discussion. They are not part of the public school system which results in lower class sizes. This is another form of parental choice. Let's give home schoolers a voucher as well as incentive to keep their kids at home keeping class sizes down.

I agree. I see no new ideas coming from public ed and the unions. Let's try it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

According to the state office of education, the state is spending $5,000 per typical student (special ed cost more) is $5000, not $7000. And putting cookies in a row still doesn't decreased all of the fixed costs of education -- the power bill, custodians, etc. And class size will not go down, because the school only gets funded for the students it has, si expect class size to increase. The writer who discussed the FTE was right on.

Mr. Jarvis,
It seems your "Liberty Academy" has already seen the positive sides of vouchers. If you had low enrollment, you have no one to blame but yourself. You obviously weren't a school that people wanted to enroll in. The marketforces worked. Your school was underperforming for what ever reasons, and people didn't come to your school. Isn't that the goal of vouchers? To weed out the bad and keep the good? I have not decided yet on how I will vote. I am waiting for the other side in Friday's column. I have 4 young kids in public school so I am contributing to the overcrowding "problem", and I want real answers which seem hard to come by.

Chris,

If you have been following the Voucher debate for almost a year I have been pretty outspoken against Vouchers. I have read both bills and every main article on the issue in the Trib, DNews and the Daily Herald, and a great deal of the opinion pieces on the subject for well over a year. I have a well-informed opinion and am not one of those paid by out of state interest groups (PCE or any teacher Union which I am not affiliated with). I am a currently unemployed teacher who was laid off because of a budget crises due to low enrollment at Liberty; The school lay-off being a prime example that Eyre's cookie analogy is grossly incorrect in how funding occurs.

I know of the good part of the bill (payment of Vouchers quarterly). Unfortunately for Voucher Supporters I know the bulk of the bunk of the bill as well and have been very active since being laid off informing the Public why the Voucher scheme fails lacking safeguards to do what it has been purported to do.

Funding issue:

I heard Gov. Huntsman on KSL with Doug Wright state very clearly that the voucher money spent will be replaced back into the school system from the "General Fund". This is going to help our schools. We need to support this. It is not 100% clear what the outcome will be other than smaller class sizes with the same amount of money in that class. One argument that the public schools make is that the private schools have no accountability and are not required to have college educated teachers. No child left behind is a accountability for the public schools and they can not stand it. Also, parents will investigate schools and if the teachers are not qualified they will put them back in public school or "choose" another private school. I am very skeptical why the out of state special interests are pouring so much money into this issue. When has anyone cared about Utah from the East Coast.

My view is that with our current school situation in our state, we can't afford to take that risk.

In how many situations in the world do you see a situation where there is in untested experimental idea that can possibly be implemented by 51 similar systems and the system that has the highest risk is the one chosen to implement the program? Rarely if ever.

If you modify the course of a train by only an inch and let it run for four years in that direction it will take quite a bit more than an inch to fix the change if you don't like it.

I think before our (broken educational) state gambles with an unproven program we need to have some solid cause and effect research done by states who have no problems.

Use the Charter schools as an example. They were not instituted in Utah until some legitimate cause and effect research was done by states who have much less risk. They were proven to work in those systems, so we decided to follow suit and implement them in our system.

Michelle,

The out of State lobbyist group that you represent needs to come up with more intelligent design for board posting. Vouchers ventured is a substantial loss compared to staying put with the public system we got. For the greatest gain those funds should be directed toward Public education and fixing problems like over-crowding that are common to an under-funded system. Your group wants our State to fund un-mandated with lack of oversight education because they stand to make billions in Private school development that can only happen if demand is artificially increased by Vouchers.

Alan Sutton,

Your comments were much more meaningful. However Vouchers have been tried with higher level of accountability in other States and cities. Milwaukee despite having more protections against fraud than our Voucher experiment, had quite a bit of fraud and failed Private schools. They had some that met the needs of the students as well. Vouchers in our state have loopholes to accountability that should attract unscrupulous people to prey on the program's weaknesses. We won't catch them with the first audit five years after the school starts. And the school could have come and gone before ever being audited.

Vouchers will hurt.

When $ is tagged to a child, the schools must compete for the child. Right now, the public schools have an entitlement - they do not have the pressure to fight for business. When a company is guaranteed customers, the customer service stops. Vouchers might fix it, the might not � but the current system is horrible and it is the unions fault. Nothing they say should have any weight.

The article�s example of colleges/universities is great. Why are public universities competently competing w/ private ones? Because the public universities are not guaranteed any business. They must FIGHT to get students. I like the idea of a free market.

Brad,

Yes I worked for Liberty and the layoffs did happen in the past--two weeks ago on October 5th. I don't think this is too far in the distant past that any legislator would deprive me of the validity of my argument.

PCE, an out-of-state special interest lobbyist group has been funding candidates in campaign contributions for years slowly getting enough people elected to squeak the bill through by a single vote. If someone contributed to your campaign I am sure you would listen to what it is they wanted, and saw to it that you would continue to get financial help in further elections. That is the prime reason the law barely got on the books. I am sure the total sum of spending for lobbying in this manner far exceeds that spent by the NEA. I actually think the NEA wasted its money, because Voucher Supporters are killing the golden goose themselves between the Sutherland Institute and Eyre's cookies. I would like to keep BOTH interest groups out of the issue.

I don't fault Huntsman for Vouchers though. He actually believes in Vouchers for choice well before he likely accepted contributions.