A Look at HSB 651: The Iowa “Student Opportunity Act”
HSB 641 establishes vouchers (Education Savings Accounts) and expands private charters in Iowa.
By Randy Richardson
Before I get into the details I want to be clear that these are my opinions. I’m not an expert on interpreting legislation, so it’s always possible that I might misunderstand a something in a bill … but what the heck, here goes.
Part I
There are a number of issues with this bill. First of all, it largely copies the education savings grant language that was introduced earlier by Chelgren (SF2091). It does omit home schoolers from being eligible for these grants. Representative Rogers has stated that this bill will be revenue neutral. Based upon the numbers I ran on this bill that is far from accurate.
The Department of Ed has data on the number of nonpublic school students by grade level. In a normal year, about 3,200 kindergarten students begin classes each year in a nonpublic (private) school. Those students never set foot in a public school, so they have not been accounted for in regular education spending. Using the $5,000 that Rep. Rogers believes each grant will cost, the state will need to pay out $16 million in the fist year of the bill just to fund the kindergarten students. Additional costs will be likely as some public school students decide to move to a private school.
Normally the number of students attending private school stays the same from K–5, drops for middle school, and then drops again for high school. When we look at the cost of Rogers’ proposal, we have to remember that ever succeeding year brings a new crop of kids to kindergarten, which adds additional costs to his bill.
We can cost this bill two ways. We can cost it by assuming that the 3,200 students who begin kindergarten will move through grade 12 in the same numbers. The second way would be to assume that numbers decrease as students move to middle and then high school. I’ll show the costing both ways.
We also have to remember that while Rep. Rogers estimates the cost of the grants at $5,000, the language in the bill doesn’t fix the costs. I’m going to assume that the costs increase the same measly 1% a year that Republicans want to increase spending this year. Based on these assumptions, the cost of this bill over 13 years (the length of time it takes students to move from K to 12th grade) is just over $202 million, assuming that 3,200 students enroll each year and all stay in school. The cost drops to a minimum of just over $171 million if we assume numbers decline as students move through school.
Part II
• The bill still calls for a private company to manage the money set aside for education savings grants, but doesn’t set aside any money to pay for it. If a private company charges the state just a 1% fee to manage the funds, we would add another $160,000 a year to the cost of the bill.
• There are no start-up costs for charter schools included in the bill. It does say that the initial contract would include an estimate of charter enrollment that would be used for funding, but no mechanism to actually get the funding to charters ahead of time.
• The charter school section includes a whole host of requirements for charters that they normally don’t encounter, like accepting special ed students. Thankfully I suspect a lot of charter school operators won’t come to Iowa because of these requirements.
• The charter school section of the bill says that transportation dollars will be provided to the schools. Since charters won’t have traditional geographic boundaries like public schools there is some huge potential costs to this.
• The bill also requires additional oversight from the Department of Education, but doesn’t include any funds to hire the additional staff needed to provide this oversight.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the drift. This is a seriously flawed bill, and the money could be used much better by our public schools.
