(Radio Iowa) – A bill that would send more tax dollars direly to charter schools has cleared the Iowa House. It would require public schools to let charter school students participate in all extracurricular activities, like sports and band. The bill also would create a revolving loan fund for charter school and it would expand homeschooling options.
An unlimited number of unrelated children could be taught in a home-based setting and tuition and fees could be charged to cover expenses. Representative Angel Ramirez, a Democrat from Cedar Rapids, says the proposal lacks safeguards and it means large groups of kids could to be taught anywhere — a backyard, a basement or a barn — and parents could wind up losing thousands of dollars in tuition.
“Not all home-school teachers would be doing this. There are a lot of really great homeschooling programs,” she said. “The problem is that this amendment does not prevent the bad actors from acting.” Other Democrats say the plan penalizes public schools by recalculating state funds for teacher salaries and by forcing public schools to provide extracurricular activities for charter school students — without covering the extra costs associated with those activities.
Representative Skyler Wheeler, a Republican from Des Moines, says Republicans hold a 67 seat super majority in the Iowa House because they’ve defended parents and pursued these kind of policies.
“What we have heard today has not been ‘parents first’ or ‘students first.’ It’s been about money,” Wheeler said. “If you want to take your kid to a private school or a charter school or you want them to be doing school online or you want to home-school them, I don’t care. That’s your decision and the state shouldn’t get in the way of it.”
The bill would let parents apply for a semester’s worth of state funding to cover private school expenses if their child switches from a public to a private school in the middle of the school year. Current law makes an eight-thousand dollar payment at the beginning of the school year for both semesters.
Democrats unsuccessfully proposed an addition to the bill — that private schools be required to accept all students who apply, something Republican candidate for governor Randy Feenstra mentioned last week.
Debate on the bill was temporarily suspended three times as legislators’ arguments about that and other proposals got heated. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.
