As Florida’s public education system goes on trial, school choice comes up

Alachua County School Board member Eileen Roy testifies in court Friday (screenshot).
Alachua County School Board member Eileen Roy testifies in court Friday (screenshot from the Florida Channel)).

Late in its first week of trial, the wide-ranging lawsuit challenging the state of Florida’s education system veered into school choice issues.

An Alachua County school board member told a Leon County circuit court that, among other things, charter and “voucher schools” aren’t subject to the same mandates as those run by her district, and that those options draw students, and therefore money, away from traditional public schools.

The long-running case, whose trial continues this week after more nearly seven years of legal battles, argues Florida has shortchanged its public schools in violation of the state constitution. Lawyers for the state have maintained the plaintiffs’ arguments address “political questions” about education policy that shouldn’t be decided in court.

A line of arguments, introduced in 2014, takes aim at charter schools and two private school choice programs — tax credit scholarships for low-income children and McKay scholarships for special needs students.

Late last year, Leon County judge George Reynolds rejected some of those additions to the case, including a direct constitutional challenge of the scholarship programs. (Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, helps administer the tax credit scholarships).

The plaintiffs, who consist mostly of parents and activist groups, can still make arguments about the programs’ effect on the education system as a whole.

During her Friday testimony, Eileen Roy, a member of the Alachua County School Board, said her district was losing funding as charter schools grew and students enrolled in private schools with the help of choice programs.

Her comments prompted cross-examination by Dick Komer, an attorney with the Insitute for Justice. He represents parents who use the scholarship programs, and had been sidelined for much of the week as the proceedings focused on issues like funding and school improvement.

Komer said that if students use a scholarship to attend a private school, the district no longer bears the cost of educating them, which means the district needs to build fewer schools and hire fewer teachers. Any funding lost by the district would be offset by declining expenses.

Roy summed up this point herself, under questioning from Komer. Under Florida’s funding system, she said, “the more students you have, the more money you need, and the more money you get.” But she pushed back on his attempts to illustrate the reverse (the fewer students you have, the less money you need) would also be true.

Roy also said the district must serve as a provider of last resort. If students leave a private or charter school, she said, district schools must be prepared to serve them, and have the teachers and classrooms in place to do so.

The state’s constitutional mandate to provide a high-quality education applies to “all children residing within” Florida — not just those who attend public schools. Komer pointed out that many districts, including Alachua County schools, place at least some special-needs students in private schools to provide children with a free and appropriate public education, a practice enabled under federal law.

In a sense, he said, McKay scholarships allow parents to do the same thing, albeit by choice, and at a larger scale.

Roy said she felt district schools, in general, provide a higher quality education than private schools. The best private schools, she said, often charge students more than $12,000 for tuition, while tax credit scholarships are only worth $5,677 per student this school year.

“If the school is operating only on scholarships, it’s not going to be be a high-quality school,” she said.

Komer, however, said the schools were accountable to parents, who could leave if they felt their children weren’t well-served. If students weren’t returning to the district en masse, he asked, “Obviously, wouldn’t you agree, the parents have been satisfied?”

“I don’t know,” Roy replied. “I don’t talk to parents whose children are in those schools.”

“The term ‘private school’ has a cache for a lot of parents who assume that a private school is superior to a public school,” she added. “It’s not the case in many, many instances, in my opinion.”

“In the opinion of the parents, they might disagree with you, correct?” Komer responded. “The program allows them that choice, correct?”

“Yes,” she replied.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.