re: Congrats to all Alabama parents of the OT: massive k-12 reform officially happening

After some initial optimism, I realized this bill looks like it is much ado about nothing. I went and read about the bill and there is a lot of misinformation and assumptions in this thread that aren't reality.

First, this is a bit unclear but although it says it is a tax credit, it appears the credit isn't refunded to the family but rather to an Education Savings Account (ESA). If you have an eligible student, the funds are deposited into an ESA that will pay directly to the school. It sounds somewhat like a 529 plan in that only eligible expenses are covered and this has to be paid directly to the school. So if your tuition is $6k, that all goes to the school from the AL Dept of Revenue and you don't get the $1k remainder.

There are also stipulations on what students qualify to receive the funds in their ESA. You have to make less than 300% of the national poverty line which is $93,000 for a family of 4. There are exceptions for special needs students and stationed military but I would think this would disqualify virtually everyone that is currently sending their kids to private school.

Given this information, I can't imagine many private schools raising their tuition because none of the parents are going to get access to the funds. I see this having the most impact on home schoolers as there are probably some families that are fed up with public schools but can't swing the tuition of private schools. This would put some money in their pockets but I have no idea how that would work logistically.

Since it is an ESA and not a tax credit, you would get nothing going from public school to another public school so I don't know how any school systems could use this to recruit athletes or honors students. Since they don't charge tuition there is no way to get these funds.

This is what was available from articles currently published so I may have misunderstood a few things but overall this sounds like a bunch of grandstanding for little actual results.

AL.com article