EDITORIAL: School vouchers worthless without options
The discussion and debate over school vouchers that nearly plunged our Commonwealth into a budget impasse reminded me of something.
A letter I and my Shenandoah Valley classmates would receive every year, letting our parents know that the school was considered a “low achieving school” and we could apply for a scholarship to go elsewhere.
That letter — and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program it outlines — is still being sent to SV students today. The most recent one is dated Feb. 27.
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“Under the OSTCP program, Shenandoah Valley School District must offer students the choice to transfer to another school district or nonpublic school,” Superintendent Brian Waite wrote in the letter to parents. “If you feel your child will be better served in another school, you may request a transfer for your child to one of the schools participating in the OSTCP.”
Schools in the bottom 15% in performance on the combined Math and Reading tests for the PSSAs or Keystone exams are considered low achieving by the state, and Shenandoah Valley has been in that category since I was in high school there.
Some legislators have been grandstanding about how the veto of the voucher program, the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success, or PASS, hurts students in low-achieving districts.
State Rep. Tim Twardzik, who represents about half of the Sentinel‘s coverage area and half of the Shenandoah Valley School District, and once represented the majority of the area, called the budget a “huge loss for PA children” in a statement today.
This despite a $567 Million allocation for public schools and $100 Million in Level Up funding, which is distributed across 100 of the least-funded districts in the state, including Shenandoah Valley, Mahanoy Area, Hazleton, and Mount Carmel.
The $100 Million PASS program, as reported by our partners at Spotlight PA, sounds very similar to the OSTC program I nearly took advantage of.
“It would give between $2,500 and $15,000 per year in state-funded vouchers to eligible students, depending on grade and whether the student needed special education services,” Spotlight’s Kate Huangpu and Katie Meyer report. “That money could be used only for tuition at a nonpublic school, or on associated fees, including special education expenses.”
The OSTC program awards up to $8,500 for a non-special education student and up to $15,000 for a special education student, according to the Department of Community and Economic Development.
As I said above, I nearly took advantage of the OSTC program. Whenever anyone asks me about how the Sentinel came to be, it always starts with how Shenandoah Valley discontinued The Torch and SVTV decades prior and there was no interest in restarting them. I had little support in the high school in charting a path forward for myself — in fact, I had direct opposition at times — so I began to look elsewhere.
But, there was nowhere to go.
The OSTC allows for transfers to other public schools, but such schools were unwilling to discuss a move.
Since Cardinal Brennan closed, Catholic options aren’t very close — 12 miles apiece to Nativity in Pottsville and Marian near Hometown, beyond the distance the OSTC would require a sending district to provide transportation. If either the OSTC or the PASS program are meant to help low income students, that’s not going to.
Additionally, the nearest non-Catholic private school is MMI Preparatory in Freeland, a 40 minute, 25 mile drive from Shenandoah.
Many who choose to leave schools like Shenandoah instead go to cyber charter schools, or Gillingham in Pottsville, which are funded by the sending district itself, often at a higher cost than the district spends on its own students.
For those that the PASS program was intended to help most, it does very little, just like the OSTC. If passed, the PASS program would not have given Shenandoah Valley students more school choice, as legislators have tried to say, because those choices need to exist first.
If Shenandoah, Mahanoy City, or Ashland still had a private school, that would be a different story. But they don’t.
Instead, the program would likely siphon more funds away from the districts in greatest need. When I was in seventh grade, state budget cuts forced Shenandoah Valley to cut both librarians, a gym teacher, two art teachers, and more. Full-day Pre-K and Kindergarten both narrowly avoided the chopping block then, too.
Most of those cuts are still felt in the district today, nearly a decade later.
The best avenue forward to support districts like Shenandoah Valley is to provide the resources they need to thrive, instead of pulling the rug out from under them for schools that don’t exist in the immediate area.
There is no guarantee, either, that providing such scholarships will incentivize private schools to choose to locate in the Shenandoah area. As they say, that would be putting the cart before the horse.
Lindenmuth is a 2017 Shenandoah Valley Jr./Sr. High School graduate and Publisher/Editor/Multimedia Journalist at The Shenandoah Sentinel.
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