BATON ROUGE -- Rep. Austin Badon Jr., D-New Orleans, and Gov. Bobby Jindal have unveiled the details of their plan to use public tax dollars to help pay low-income students' private school tuition.
The effort would be a pilot program limited to Orleans Parish and estimated to cost $10 million in its first year, as Jindal indicated in his session-opening address last month.
But House Bill 1347, filed hours before the session's deadline for new bills, appears to include no end date for the program, which would pay for low-income kindergartners through third-graders in Orleans Parish public schools to attend private or parochial schools.
Jindal calls it a scholarship program that would expand educational opportunities for poor children in bad schools. Opponents, led by the state's teachers unions, have assailed the idea as back-door vouchers that funnel tax money to private schools.
Badon said he is ready for that fight.
"The parents who would utilize this are taxpayers themselves," he said. "This is optional. Instead of forcing those parents with a specific school, this gives them the choice of where to send their children."
Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, said Jindal should focus on spending money to improve public schools.
As written, the program would begin in the 2008-09 school year. It would be open only to children in kindergarten through third grade who come from households with a total income not more than 300 percent of the federal poverty level. That threshold would be $63,300 for a family of four, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The bill says that grades beyond K-3 could be added to the program later.
The grants, paid from the state general fund, would be equivalent to 90 percent of a public schools district's combined state and local spending on an individual student in the previous school year. For Orleans Parish, that would mean about a $6,300 voucher at the start of the program, paid directly to participating private schools by the state.
Assuming every eligible child received that maximum amount, the $10 million earmarked in Jindal's proposed budget would pay for about 1,500 students.
The private schools would have to agree to accept the payments as the entire tuition obligation from the eligible students coming from public schools. The private campuses also would have to meet the accountability standards set by the state Department of Education for public schools.
The schools would have to administer the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program test to fourth- and eighth-graders in the program, though the schools could substitute other state-approved standardized tests.
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Bill Barrow can be reached at [email protected] or (225) 342-5590