“Parents are angry about the woke agenda that is being forced on their children,” Gov. Abbott said during an event at a Christian school in Texas. “Our schools are for education, not indoctrination.” Conservative support for public schools in rural Texas:
A classroom at a New Home Independent School District facility in New Home, Texas on March 28, 2023.
The school voucher movement, which seeks to direct public money to private or religious schools, has rapidly gained steam in conservative states as parents battle public schools over books in the libraries, the teaching of race and racism, and transgender issues. More than a dozen states have adopted some form of school vouchers. This year several, including Florida, Iowa and Utah, voted to create expansive new programs open to all students, an approach pioneered in Arizona.
The governor has made the issue the centerpiece of his third term early on, crisscrossing the state to rally support at more than a dozen exclusively Christian schools. The state’s powerful lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, is also a strong backer, as are deep-pocketed Republican donors unafraid to back primary challenges to Republicans who do not support their priorities.
The debate in Texas comes amid increasingly aggressive efforts by state officials to oversee the direction of public schools, which are independently managed at the local level by elected school boards. In March, the Texas Education Agency announced it would take over Houston’s public schools, superseding the local school board and ousting its superintendent, citing failures at one of the district's high schools.
The Senate voucher bill also included a prohibition on the teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity at all levels of public school, similar to the restrictions passed last year in Florida, a provision that directly connects the fights over education content to the fight over funding. “Let’s say they did this,” said Kayla Ferguson, a Republican who owns The Spot, a recently renovated small restaurant by the school, where her three daughters are students. “It wouldn’t be something where they wouldn’t have public schools, right?”
“We’ve doubled and doubled again,” Shane Fiedler, the superintendent of the New Home district, said of the school population, which is now more than 630 students. A small public school with broad support from the community can support that as well as any private school, he and other parents said.Seated in his windowless office, Fiedler said he was not worried that a voucher program would mean losing students to private schools. But because of the way the Texas legislation is structured, he said, there is a different threat: Private school vouchers could drain the state funding reservoir available to public schools.
Unlike some other school districts across the state, New Home has few sources of local funding apart from property taxes on homes, and relies very heavily on money from the state, based on attendance.
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