Gov. Kim Reynolds, surrounded by lawmakers and school children, speaks in the Capitol rotunda before signing her private-school scholarship legislation Jan. 24, 2023. (Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Iowa Democrats argued Friday that the state’s Education Savings Account program is linked with 16 public school closures in the past two years.
But the governor’s office disputed the claims, saying they are inaccurate.
The ESA program gives taxpayer dollars to Iowa families to use for private school tuition and associated costs for K-12 students. Families can receive $7,826 per student for the 2024-25 school year.
The program was signed into law in January 2023 by Gov. Kim Reynolds, who made it a top priority during the 2022 election season.
However, Democratic leaders and education professionals said Iowa’s public school system is worse off because of the ESA program, stating that the measure takes away taxpayer funding from the state’s public schools. Democrats have made the private-school funding a central issue in their campaign to win back seats from the Republican legislative majority.
During a news conference Friday, Democratic legislative leaders said new data from the Iowa Department of Education shows that 16 public schools have closed since the program began, while 36 new private schools have opened.
Many of the public school closures are in rural areas, while many new private schools are in urban and suburban communities, House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst said.
While multiple rural school districts have already faced years of uncertainty about maintaining current facilities due to funding and enrollment issues, Konfrst said there was a “direct correlation” between the ESA program and fewer resources going to public schools.
“When the private school budgets, the money that we’re sending to the school vouchers, is an unlimited appropriation, and when it’s coming off the top of our budget, we know that that money is — by design — going to make less money available for public education,” Konfrst said. “And so, while those schools may have been struggling already, what we’re doing is we’re siphoning money away from them and giving them less and less funding every year, while giving them more and more reporting requirements, which cost money, as we’ve heard. And it’s just made this the situation untenable in many of these districts and many of these buildings.”
As rural school districts see some school closures, Lori Slings, school board member of Southeast Polk Community School District, said the ESA program is especially hurting rural school districts by not ensuring access to education within their communities. Of the new private schools listed, 13 of the 36 schools that have opened in the past two years are in the Des Moines metro, she said.
Additionally, the state will fully lift the income eligibility limit for ESAs next school year. During the current school year, all kindergarteners, Iowa public school students and private school students with a family income of 400% or below the federal poverty line were eligible for the program, an increase from the 300% FPL limit during the 2023-2024 school year.
This change will mean that taxpayer funds are going to wealthy families’ private school tuition, Slings said, leaving less funding for public schools — as well as hurting the quality of education at public schools in other ways.
“Public students learn from each other, top students down to our most challenged, they are all better together,” Slings said. “Public schools succeed when we work to help all students. What will be left of public schools if we drain them of all the high achievers, the achievers that private schools accept, all that is left are the students that cannot afford to buy a private school education, or the students private schools have rejected as they do not excel in class, or they have more expensive needs? We cannot let this happen to Iowa public schools.”
Gov. Kim Reynolds’ office pushed back against the claims that the issue of school closures were linked to the ESA program, stating that some of the information put out in the news release was inaccurate. Two of the schools cited by Democrats remained open, according to Mason Mauro, deputy communications director for the governor’s office, while other factors like a school closing because a new facility opened were not listed.
He also said some of the private schools listed as “new” had been in operation prior to the ESA program but had recently become accredited.
Mauro said the numbers released by Democratic lawmakers were “so inaccurate that it seems like they are trying to intentionally mislead Iowans.”
“As Gov. Reynolds has said, the idea that Iowa’s traditional public schools, charter schools, and private schools are engaged in a zero-sum struggle is both unhelpful and wrong,” Mauro said in a news release. “Instead, all schools are an indispensable part of a single education system that’s responsible for every Iowa child. The success of each group encourages the success of the others. ”