Tiffany Brown’s children receive Utah Fits All Scholarships to help them attend a private school … [+]
Since 2020, states have rapidly expanded school choice programs to give parents options. Some states, like Florida, have expanded existing programs to expand eligibility. Others, like West Virginia, created their first school choice program. It’s been a new era for educational choice, but one thing remains the same: lawsuits are popping up to try to stop the programs.
In just the past few weeks, opponents of school choice sued over recently passed programs in two states: Utah and Arkansas. But in both states, parents are stepping up to defend the programs in court and keep options open for their children’s schooling.
Utah currently operates two smaller scholarship programs to help special needs students afford educational options that meet their needs, but last year it created the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program. Utah Fits All is an education savings account (ESA) and every student in the state is eligible for up to $8,000 in scholarship money annually. The program is wildly popular, with more than 27,000 applicants for the 10,000 scholarships available in the first year.
Parents can use an ESA to help pay for educational expenses ranging from private school tuition to home schooling, and public school students can also qualify for partial scholarships to help pay for other education expenses.
Despite the popularity of the program, three weeks ago, Utah’s largest teachers union sued to have the courts stop it. The union president claims that the Utah Fits All “harms public school students and educators.” One of the program’s major supporters, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams (R) countered that the state had increased funding for state education by nearly 100% in the past decade and said Utah Fits All “empowers kids who might struggle in traditional academic settings by providing them with the resources they need to succeed in the classroom and beyond.”
Now parents Maria Ruiz and Tiffany Brown are stepping into the lawsuit to defend the program for their children. This is the first new defense of a program for the Partnership for Educational Choice, a joint project of the Institute for Justice (IJ) and EdChoice.
As Tiffany pointed out in a press release, “Not every child learns the same way and some families, like mine, have children with special needs, so it is important that parents can afford educational options that best address a child’s needs.”
Just two weeks later, school choice opponents in Arkansas filed a similar suit against the Education Freedom Accounts Program, which was created last year as part of a broader education reform package. The EFA provides eligible families with up to $6,856 to cover certain educational expenses. Eligible students include students with a disability, students experiencing homelessness, current or former foster care children, the children of military members, the children of first responders, and more. The program will also grow in future years to expand eligibility to all Arkansas families.
One aspect of the legal attack in Arkansas sets it apart from the suit in Utah and previous lawsuits in other states: a malicious attempt to bankrupt schools that accepted scholarship students.
Typically suits against school choice programs only ask the courts to stop a program from operating and to pay legal fees of the plaintiffs if they are successful. But in Arkansas the opponents are asking for the court to drag every education entity that accepted scholarship dollars into the lawsuit and then make them refund the money to the state.
The scholarship funds that parents directed to the schools were for services that the schools provided—services it cost the schools to provide. If that money is taken away, it doesn’t erase the tuition bill. Schools could be left in the untenable position of collecting the unpaid tuition from parents who cannot afford it.
The Partnership for Educational Choice intervened in the suit last week on behalf of Arkansas mothers Erika Lara, Katie Parrish, and Nikita Glendenning. “Before I received my Education Freedom Account, my son was being bullied and struggling academically, but now I have the resources to put him into a school where he’s thriving,” said Erika. “Taking away this program would put my son’s academic and social progress in jeopardy.”
Teachers unions and other school choice opponents may want to keep their monopolies, but parents in Utah and Arkansas have hope today that their children can go to the school that is right for them, not the school they were assigned by zip code.
