Commentary: Kentucky Supreme Court should recognize the benefits of school choice

By Andrew Vandiver and John Meiser

Lately, over 15,000 extra Kentucky college students have began attending a faculty apart from a public faculty. Mother and father, in fact, have all the time sought what’s greatest for his or her kids. However this shift represents a rise in parental empowerment that calls for consideration.

That’s why EdChoice KY partnered with attorneys from Notre Dame Legislation Faculty’s Spiritual Liberty Initiative to help Kentucky’s faculty alternative program earlier than the Commonwealth’s Supreme Court docket.
 
As extra households transfer towards private colleges, Kentucky mother and father referred to as on lawmakers to alleviate the price of selecting these instructional choices. The Kentucky Common Meeting responded by passing the Schooling Alternative Account Act (“EOA Act”), which created a privately funded needs-based help program for Kentucky households to cowl sure instructional bills. This system covers a broad vary of bills, together with tutoring companies, therapies for college students with particular wants, profession coaching and dual-credit faculty programs. The regulation additionally created a pilot program that may supply tuition help to assist college students attend PK-12 private colleges in counties with greater than 90,000 folks.

Kentucky’s new program is in good firm. Greater than 30 states — together with each state bordering Kentucky —have some type of private-school-choice program. Final yr alone, greater than 20 states handed measures to create or enhance them. The surest approach to offer the most effective instructional alternatives to our youngsters is by empowering mother and father to enroll their kids within the colleges of their alternative.

Having misplaced the battle towards increasing instructional alternatives for Kentucky kids within the legislature, instructional alternative opponents filed a lawsuit difficult the constitutionality of the EOA Act. Sadly, the Franklin County Circuit Court docket agreed and struck down the EOA Act. Regardless of the regulation’s sturdy help, Kentucky households have been nonetheless blocked from acquiring this system’s nice advantages.

The courtroom’s resolution is incorrect on the regulation and, maybe worse, it displays a critical misunderstanding of the vital function that private colleges and school-choice applications just like the EOA Act play in PK-12 schooling.

Luckily, the Kentucky Supreme Court docket has taken up the case on an enchantment filed by Lawyer Common Daniel Cameron and the Institute for Justice. The temporary EdChoice KY submitted proudly helps their efforts.

From the very starting — and properly earlier than the arrival of the public-school system of as we speak — private colleges have offered a vital service to Kentucky’s various scholar inhabitants. Because the nineteenth century, many private colleges—spiritual and secular alike—crammed a vital hole in Kentucky for college students who couldn’t entry public colleges.
 
These colleges weren’t insular enclaves of privilege or wealth that sought to divide households or sequester instructional alternatives. Simply the other. Certainly, some estimate that throughout the mid-1800s as many as one-third of the scholars in Kentucky’s Catholic colleges have been Protestant. This story stays true as we speak with the overwhelming majority of personal colleges serving college students exterior of their custom, together with many faith-based colleges wherein a lot of the scholar physique is of a distinct religion.

John Meiser

Personal colleges of every kind serve a various array of scholars in Kentucky, together with these most in want.

An EdChoice KY survey of personal colleges throughout the Commonwealth discovered lots of their college students certified for federal free or decreased lunch and {that a} third of scholars obtained monetary help. The survey additional discovered that 20% of the scholar inhabitants in these colleges had particular wants. At the least 5 of the responding colleges serve solely college students with particular wants.

Kentucky private colleges embrace a broad array of backgrounds and religion traditions. EdChoice KY’s board displays this variety with representatives of colleges from Christian and Jewish traditions and people that aren’t religiously affiliated. Whereas we come from completely different backgrounds, all of us agree that instructional alternative stays out of attain for too many households. Personal colleges present hundreds of thousands in monetary help, however a big quantity of want stays unmet. In too many situations, households should forgo the prospect to attend a private faculty that may greatest serve their baby’s wants.

These unmet wants are precisely what the EOA Act goals to meet.

Academic alternative is lengthy overdue in Kentucky. The Commonwealth has lengthy been house to a variety of instructional choices. Upholding the EOA Act will open the doorways to these high-quality colleges for future generations of scholars to come back.

Andrew Vandiver is the president of EdChoice KY. John Meiser is the Supervising Lawyer for the Spiritual Liberty Clinic at Notre Dame Legislation Faculty.