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Peters Township School District resolution opposes state tuition voucher plan

By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read
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Peters Township School Board has approved a resolution that opposes a state Senate bill calling for a tuition voucher program, but one board member insisted it be clear that the vote was not unanimous.

“I would like my name as an opposing vote on the document,” the Rev. Jamison Hardy, who joined William Merrell in dissenting, said at the board’s March 19 meeting.

Resolution opposing SB 2

The resolution, drafted by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, claims in part that Senate Bill 2 of 2017, known as the Education Savings Account Act, would serve to “undermine Pennsylvania’s responsibility to ensure every student in every community has equal access to public education.”

Provisions of the bill – sponsored by Sen. John DiSanto, R-Dauphin County – call for the ability of students who live in the service area of a “low-achieving public school” to receive funds through an education savings account to cover tuition and other qualified expenses at nonpublic schools. In turn, money to fund the account is taken from state subsidies to the district of residence.

The bill defines “low-achieving” as:

“A public school that ranked in the lowest 15 percent of the school’s designation as an elementary school or a secondary school based on combined mathematics and reading scores from the annual assessment administered in the previous school year and for which the department has posted results on its publicly accessible Internet website.”

Lisa Anderson, Peters Township School Board’s PSBA liaison, cited reasons for introducing the resolution that include her opinion that “private schools have to accept every student that knocks on their doors and have to provide what we have to provide in a free public education.”

“Until they have to comply with the same rules and regulations that we do,” she said, “I think that none of the public money should be going to a private entity.”

Although he expressed disdain for SB 2 as written, Merrell favors the idea of providing support for those who choose private schools for their children.

Senate Bill 2 of 2017

“My concern is, if we don’t allow those people to pick other than public education, we’ll only be taught one thought, one way to think and what to think,” he said. “This is a terrible bill on every level, and I can’t believe that other people have signed on to this. But the bottom line is, those parents deserve an avenue to provide a better education.”

Hardy prefaced his remarks prior to the March 19 vote by noting that his “service on the school board speaks for itself in my support of public education,” and that he attended private schools and colleges throughout his life.

“The hallmark of private education is the ability, as Mr. Merrell has pointed out, to hold to standards and also to ethical principles that society and public schools don’t have to,” he said. “We have got to protect against this uniformity, where everybody has one opportunity and we protect against having any different thought and any different understanding of things.”

Regarding the PSBA’s opposing to SB 2, the resolution also states that a voucher program would benefit “families regardless of income or need, including students already enrolled in private schools or never having attended a targeted public school.”

“You could still qualify for one of these vouchers, even if you’re the richest person or the poorest person in that area,” Anderson said. “Who is going to be able to benefit from that most is the wealthy or maybe the upper-middle-class parents who can make up the difference between what tuition will be and what it won’t be. But the poorest families in that area are not going to move to a private school as easily if the tuition exceeds the amount that voucher would be.”

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