Letter to the Editor: Senate File 2091: Impact on public education in rural schools

To the Editor:

I would like to call your attention to the dangers of a bill that could move our local schools to consolidate in the near future. If a few students are removed from each grade level, our local schools’ budget could not tolerate the loss of those dollars. This bill would devastate our rural schools by handing out taxpayer-funded debit cards to parents with little or no accountability.

The bill would pay $6600 of your hard-earned tax-dollars to each student who is enrolled in a nonpublic school or homeschooled. The money would be placed in an account that parents could access with a debit card. According to the bill, parents could spend your tax dollars on anything that is considered “materials for a course of study for a specific subject matter or grade level.”

Who decides what materials are valid? How do we evaluate if students met educational benchmarks in those settings? We deserve guaranteed results and better education from every tax dollar spent. In order to strengthen our local economies, we need to ensure we have strong public schools to attract workers and retain families in rural Iowa.

I call on our state legislators to vote against Senate File 2091. If you are concerned about public education in rural schools, please contact your area legislator, including Representative Hager and Senator Breitbach here locally, at 515-281-3221.

Lori R. Egan
Waukon