Idaho House OKs bill allowing money for private schooling

BOISE — After more than two hours of debate, the Idaho House on Friday voted to send a $50 million “parental choice tax credit” bill to the Senate.

Nearly half the members of the chamber stood up to speak during a debate over if the bill was sufficiently accountable, which state agency should be tasked with overseeing such a program, and whether public school funds should go to private school tuition. Members voted 42-28 in favor of the bill.

Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, sponsored the bill, which is an amended version of a bill proposed last year that failed to make it out of committee.

“If I thought for one minute that this bill would harm public schools or children, I would not be standing here with it,” Horman said Friday.

HB 93 would allow for parents to receive up to $5,000 per K-12 student to be used for qualified educational expenses, which could include private school tuition. Priority would be given in the first year to households earning at or below 300% of the federal poverty level. In the following years, priority would be given to families that previously had the credit.

Students up to age 21 with disabilities would be eligible for up to $7,500.

Students enrolled full-time or part-time in public school at the time of application would not be eligible.

Several Republicans spoke to concerns they had about the lack of oversight into private schooling and the potential for the costs of the program to grow if demand increases.

Horman said the accountability in the bill is that misusing the funds would be considered tax fraud and parents would be required to fill out a survey rating their satisfaction with the schooling. There are requirements that the instruction includes, at a minimum, English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies. There would be required record retention of instruction to demonstrate it meets that minimum instruction requirement and that it “be available in case of any audit by the state tax commission.”

Rep. Marco Erickson, R-Idaho Falls, said that as someone who has worked in the mental health field with young people, he has always had to undergo a background check and meet certain restrictions to work with students in schools.

“As a professional person who’s worked with children my entire career, I’ve had to be background checked almost annually to make sure that I’m a safe person to work with those kids,” Erickson said. “And when there’s no provision in there that even allows for that, it bothers me a lot.”

Assistant Majority Leader Rep. Josh Tanner, R-Eagle, said that he put his kids in private school because public schools “did not seem to work out very well.”

“I was blessed to make that choice, but not every family is actually blessed to make that choice,” Tanner said.

He also argued that it was the taxpayers’ money to do with what they felt best.

Assistant Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, said few people in the state pay so much in state taxes that they would be paying $5,000 into the state education system.

“We are talking about OPM — other people’s money — on this,” Rubel said. “The vast majority of money that goes into the public education system is coming from people who don’t have kids in either system.”

She said “recipient satisfaction” wasn’t a high enough bar for taxpayer funds, giving the hypothetical example of a person who asked for Medicaid funds for dialysis but used them to go to Hawaii instead.

“We would never give a person in that scenario a check and say ‘aloha, enjoy,’ ” Rubel said

Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, R-Idaho Falls, said there was no way in the bill to ensure families weren’t “double-dipping” with other programs, such as the Empowering Parents grant program that also provides grants for educational expenses.

Rep. Tony Wisniewski, R-Post Falls, cited past Supreme Court decisions that removed Bible reading and prayer from schools and said that this bill was needed in order to uphold the state constitutional obligation to keep the “temperance and morality” of the state.

“The way to do that is to stand up to the federal government, and I’m not certainly advocating for that, because we saw what happened in another state in the South that defied a federal requirement for desegregation,” Wisniewski said. “They sent federal troops in. That’s not the right way to do it. The best possible solution, in my opinion, is to assist parents in choosing the learning environment that satisfies their responsibility to teach their children their sincerely held beliefs without government interference, and this bill is the closest thing that has happened during my tenure here in the House.”

Some noted that the majority of private schools are located in the state’s few urban areas.

Majority Leader Jason Monks, R-Meridian, countered that rural areas “don’t have those options oftentimes because parents are happy with their schools.”

The bill heads to the Senate, which also will have under consideration another school choice bill that would add school tuition to the Empowering Parents grant program under a number of restrictions.

Guido covers Idaho politics for the Lewiston Tribune, Moscow-Pullman Daily News and Idaho Press of Nampa. She may be contacted at lguido@idahopress.com and can be found on Twitter @EyeOnBoiseGuido.

How they voted

Yes: Kyle Harris-R, Dale Hawkins-R, Brandon Mitchell-R, Heather Scott-R, Charlie Shepherd-R

No: Lori McCann-R