Voucher ruling could oust kids from schools

More than 350 schoolchildren in Arizona might be forced to leave their schools this fall, when the state will stop its two-year-old practice of paying for them to attend private schools.

The decision to stop payments came as a result of a recent state appeals court ruling that two voucher programs - one for students with disabilities and one for those in the state's foster care system - are unconstitutional.

In the May ruling, the judge said the programs violate a provision in the state's constitution barring use of tax dollars to benefit private or sectarian schools.

Tim Keller, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is defending the programs, said he will file a notice of appeal with the Arizona Supreme Court by June 16 to overturn the lower court decision.

But last week, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, whose education department disperses the vouchers, said that while he will continue to take applications for the program, he won't make any future payments to private schools unless the ruling is overturned.

That means families of hundreds of children don't know if their kids will be able to continue in private schools this fall.

During the last school year, the state doled out an estimated $2.29 million in voucher funds.

Shannon McDowell, whose 10-year-old son, Brayden, has Asperger syndrome, uses a voucher to pay the roughly $22,000 tuition at Gateway Academy in Scottsdale, a specialty school for children with autism.

"I think we would really try to keep him there," she said. "(Brayden) comes first and I think it would be worth getting a loan and almost treating it like it's college. But it would be tough."

McDowell said she tried the public school system for many years, but teachers there did not know where to place her son, or how to help him. He was intellectually gifted, but his behavioral problems put him in special-education classes where he was constantly bored. And he would leave every morning, crying and saying he "hated school," she said.

After two years at Gateway, which gives children a combination of physical, speech, music, and even equine therapy, McDowell said things have changed,

"Now, on the weekends he asks if he can go to school. He loves it so much," she said.

Twenty students - about one-third of Gateway's student population - are counting on the vouchers to cover their tuition this fall, said Robin Sweet, who runs the school.

"It just breaks my heart," she said. "Otherwise, there is no way they can afford to put their children here, and they are so happy and doing so well, and the families are so happy with their lives at home."

Removing the children from the school is a "formula for disaster," she said.

"No. 1, the kids don't like change. And No. 2, they're here because the public school system failed them. Bottom line, that's just the reality, and to put them back into an environment where they've been bullied and teased and tortured," Sweet said.

Many of the 179 children with disabilities using vouchers this past year attended private schools dedicated to autism, while nearly all the 191 children using the foster-care grants attended religious schools.

At Chrysalis Academy in Tempe, one of the private schools helping children with autism, roughly half its students use vouchers.

One of those is Lexie Weck, 6. Andrea Weck, a single mother, said she doesn't know what will happen if she doesn't get the voucher, but that she will probably try to find some outside loan or assistance so her daughter can stay at Chrysalis.

"It's going to disrupt our whole plan. We were working really hard on getting her talking," Weck said, adding that the school is planning to implement a new speech therapy to help Lexie start speaking, which she hasn't yet done.

Still, voucher advocates hope the Supreme Court will take the case and overturn the earlier decision.

Meanwhile, voucher opponents, including the state's largest teachers union, maintain the programs ultimately hurt both special-education and mainstream students. They say private schools lack the accountability of their public counterparts and take away already limited school funding for the rest of the state's children.