From today's Denver Post:

After months of study, roiling controversy and emotional debate, the Douglas County school board Tuesday night unanimously approved a groundbreaking plan to help pay tuition for hundreds of students to attend private schools.

The pilot program, which will be reviewed each year, would make up to 500 students eligible to receive $4,575 to attend a private school in the 2011-12 school year ...

... The district estimates it would save about $3 million by having 500 fewer students. The district would pay about $2.29 million in voucher scholarships, but when CSAP and other expenses are deducted, the district might actually net $402,500.

After some residents complained that all but one of the 14 eligible private schools within the county are religion-based, the district revised its proposal, expanding the boundaries to include a more diverse group of private schools.

In one part of the country, parents are forcing reform in their school by triggering a law that would bring in a charter company to take things over. In another region, a school board has voted to put the interests of students and families ahead of its own by taking a step toward a pilot voucher program in the next academic year.

Both are signs that, as former assistant education secretary Bruno V. Manno recently said in Education Week, “families have hijacked the long-winded debates on school choice, taking the power to make a decision about which school a child attends away from bureaucrats, thereby empowering themselves.”

Consider families at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif. Sixty-two percent of the school’s parents signed and submitted on Tuesday a petition to the school district that would require district officials to bring in a charter company to run the school. The initiative activates California’s new “parent-trigger” law, under which families can bring sweeping changes to the state’s lowest-performing schools. “Yes, we can!” parents chanted at district headquarters.

On the same day, the school board in Douglas County, Colo., took another step toward providing additional educational options in its district by ordering its superintendent to investigate whether school vouchers would be good for the school system. The board’s president said he would like a pilot voucher program for the 2011-12 school year. (more…)