National PTA wants PTA members across the country to know about recent voucher bills introduced in Congress.
National PTA has issued the following statement:
A flurry of voucher bills introduced over the past few weeks would privatize the majority of our K-12 funds. Members of Congress are signing up to cosponsor these bills and momentum on Capitol Hill is snowballing.
Senator Lamar Alexander and Rep. Luke Messer introduced a bill (the Scholarships for Kids Act, S. 1968 /H.R. 4000) that would turn 63 percent of federal education funding into private school vouchers. That means all federal education funding – with the exception of federal subsidies for school lunches, funding for students with disabilities, and funding for students attending schools on federally impacted land or military bases – would be diverted to voucher programs. An additional bill introduced by Senator Tim Scott (the CHOICE Act, S. 1909) targets dedicated special education and military funding. S. 1909 would allow IDEA funds to be used for private school vouchers, give vouchers for students from military families, and expand the D.C. voucher program. These bills combined would turn essentially all federal education funding into vouchers.
Additional information on these bills can be found here.