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Just weeks after families created a $50 million tax credit to help pay for private schools tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has closed a program that helps tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other education expenses.
Republicans who lead the push to dispel the Idaho empowered parents’ grants said it has nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative groups, who are strong supporters of private school tax credits, painted a direct relationship.
On its website, the Idaho Freedom Foundation proposed adding $30 million to the newly created tax credits to promote parents, and has joined 6,000 private and homeschool students, 10,000 people who are already expected to benefit from the program.
The new voucher-style tax credits are very different to subsidies killed by lawmakers.
Tax credits are off limits for public school students, but grants mostly went to this group. And while states have limited monitoring of how private education tax credits are used, grants to public school families were allowed to be spent only with state-approved education vendors.
Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a Democrat who works in a low-income public elementary school in Boise, denounced the plan to kill the grant in a speech to her legislative colleagues.
“I have to go back to the families I serve, the parents I love, the children I teach.
As ProPublica reports in Arizona, when the state leads public funds to private schools, wealthy families benefit more than people in low-income parentheses. The program is pitched as enabling “school choice,” but in reality, research has found that it tends to benefit families who have already chosen private schools.
Idaho lawmakers passed a program like this this year with a new tax credit. This is described as a version of a school “voucher” that parents spend at schools chosen by other states.
This credit allows private and homeschool families to cut $5,000 per child ($7,500 per person with disabilities) or make more money from the state if they don’t have taxes. Low-income families have priority and there is no limit to the number of credits each family can claim. The law says the funds must be spent on private school tuition fees, homeschool curriculum, textbooks, and several other expenses such as transportation. However, unless the family is audited, they don’t need to prove how they spent their money.
Authorized parents had allowed the programmes that lawmakers had repealed. Wherever they were studied, it was open to students, but state data shows that at least 81% of public school students were sent to public school students this academic year. It provided up to $1,000 per student, with low-income families gaining first dibs and family limits of $3,000.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little created a similar program in 2020 called Strong Students with a Federal Pandemic Fund. State lawmakers created the current program in 2022, using one-off federal government pandemic recovery money and renewed it in 2023 with ongoing state funding.
Charlene Bradley used the grant this year to buy a laptop for her daughter, a fifth grader in the Nampa School District. Before purchasing, Bradley’s daughter was able to use computers at school, but there was no way to do her studies at home.
Debra Whiteley used it for her home internet and printer for her 12-year-old daughter, who attends a public school in northern Idaho. Whiteley’s daughter resisted doing projects that required photos and graphs. “Now when she has a project, she can make a trifold display that isn’t all hand written and self-drawn.
Annie Coltlin used it to get “many necessary” personalized tutoring for her daughter, a sophomore student in the southern Idaho farming community. The grant was paid to Coltlin’s daughter for direct mathematics tutoring twice a week.
Such families were in the minds of education leaders like Jason Seviy when they advocated for maintaining empowering parent programs this year.
Sevy, chairman of the country’s public school district committee in southwestern Idaho and president-elect of the Idaho State Board of Education, said families in his district used Empowered Parent grants for backpacks, school supplies, or other laptops they couldn’t afford.
“You’re looking at a family with five kids who only make $55,000 a year, and having that little extra money made a huge difference,” Seby said. “But the gap has also been closed so that these kids can feel like they can keep up with everyone else.”
Families in the Sevy district are rarely able to use the state’s new tuition tax credit for private education, he said. The small residential school is the only private school operating in the remote county of Sevy. The next close option requires a drive to nearby counties, and the sacred schools are worried that these schools will not take English learners or children with special education. (Unlike public schools, private schools can accept or reject students based on their own standards.)
“This is a program that was able to help those groups of people and they’re just making them leave,” Sevy said, releasing the money for private schools.
The new student legislators who supported the bill ended empowering their parents.
Blaylock’s attitude is that grants are not the right role for government.
Speaking on the Senate floor in March, Blaylock highlighted the fact that the majority of the empowered parent’s money was handed over to electronic devices, primarily computers, laptops and tablets.
“The program is far from its original intention,” Blaylock said. “It’s turning into a slash fund for technology. If we choose to continue funding, we are no longer empowering our parents. We are creating qualifications.”
In an interview, Blaylock denied his desire to divert public school money into private education and said he was unaware that the Idaho Freedom Foundation had taken that “unfortunate” position.
“The last thing I want is that this is to ‘take the public schools out of school choices.’ Because that’s not my intention,” Blaylock said.
She told the Senate Board of Education this year that her hope for ending grants is to cut government spending by $30 million. But if savings had to go somewhere, she hoped it would benefit other public school programs, especially in the year when lawmakers created a $50 million tax credit for private and homeschooling.
Regardless of how $30 million in future savings are spent, Blaylock’s argument that grants were not intended to support families in purchasing is contrary to what the legislative record is.
Lawmakers empowered parents three years ago as a way to help low-income students stay on equal footing with their peers. One lawmaker argued that tablets and computers “have been criticized on a massive scale for students’ learning if families do not have the ability to buy those devices.”
Republican Sen. Lori Den Hartog began debating the bill to create empower in 2022, saying it was to address the learning losses of the pandemic. “But it is also acknowledgement of the ongoing needs that our state students have, and we also recognize that there are potentially different paths to provide resources to those students.”
First, in the list of eligible costs, Den Hartog is spelled out: computer hardware, internet access and other technologies. After that, textbooks, school materials, private tutors, everything else appeared. (Den Hartog, who voted to abolish the program this year, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Killing the grant was against the praise that Little, the state’s Republican governor, had showered it on. He describes the program itself as a form of “school choice,” and promotes ways that can help low-income parents provide a better education.
“This grant will help families take charge of tools for their children’s education, including computers, software, educational materials, private tutors,” Little announced in January 2023 that it intended to make parents permanent.
He called the grant “effective, popular and deserved of continuous investment.”
A few months before Idaho lawmakers voted to kill the program, Little Little once again cited Empower as a success story. “To enable Idaho families to choose the best freedom and access to their children’s unique educational and learning needs.” He noted that grants were primarily made to public school students. He once again promoted it in his state speech in January. “Supporting student education outside the classroom” as a “our popular” grant program, not as a temporary pandemic era program.
Nevertheless, both the Idaho House and the Senate voted to kill the grant program significantly, and rarely signed it on April 14th.
Blaylock disagreed to predict that grant creators will primarily be used on laptops and electronic devices. And despite the state legislators admitting it to be permanent, she disagrees with the intention of it being an ongoing program. She said public schools are already spending $36 million a year from the state on technology. It is used to provide a computer that students can take home, so families don’t need state money to buy more.
Trump is spending billions on border security. Some of the residents living there do not have basic resources.
In a letter describing his decision to join lawmakers to kill grants, Little said he was “prideful of the positive outcomes” from the program. However, he writes: “The pandemic is straight in the rearview mirror and students have returned to school for a long time, so I agree with Congress that the program served that purpose.”
Looking back at how Sever, the local school board chair, was created, I suspect it was a soft attempt to “step into the door” towards the voucher, rather than an effort to meet the needs of all students.
He remembers telling Den Hartog that the program supports low-income families in his district. “She was very excited to hear that,” Sevy said. “That’s OK! And here we just got rid of it two years later.”
