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

Private schools won’t accept these kids or the tax dollars. Once you accept that money the government will be able to worm into your school and start mandating things like, more testing, special education programs, no prayer, free lunch and you won’t be a private school anymore.

We already have this in Louisiana. You get a state tax break if you send your kids to private school. Why not? You are paying state taxes towards the public schools, but your kids are not using them. It makes sense that the state should refund you something, it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor.

Public schools get something like 9 or 10 grand per student per year in Louisiana. I can’t remember off hand but I think the tax break in LA is something like 6,000.

It’s a tax break for you, not a voucher for the school. People who can’t afford private school are not going to move their kids over in droves for an end of the year tax break.

Is there anything in this reform that will address student behavior? Most of your low performing schools are due to students who don’t care, refuse to try in class, and misbehave and most of them have parents who won’t discipline their children. All of those students can go anywhere and infect other schools now? This is not going to work until we start effectively disciplining students, failing those who deserve to fail, and holding parents accountable for the behavior of their children.

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Not when charter schools are involved. That’s a money grift that this school choice funds. Those are public schools in all but name.

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Gotcha. We don’t have a lot of those in Florida where I’m at.

We’ve seen bumps in tuition with our school choice but we were getting equivalent before it.

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public school teacher here I have 170 students on my rosters I had less than 20 parents total show up for open house

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You need to get out of that environment. Education is a good gig with a masters degree and at a good school.

I have 96 students on my roster, 2 planning periods, and highly supportive parents.

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Is there anything in this reform that will address student behavior? Most of your low performing schools are due to students who don’t care, refuse to try in class, and misbehave and most of them have parents who won’t discipline their children. All of those students can go anywhere and infect other schools now?

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The flip side of that is that you can also move your child from the shitty kids at one school, to potentially a better school

Can someone provide synopsis?

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

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It sounds like for most in Alabama, they’ll be using someone else’s tax dollars..most don’t pay enough to cover the 7k credit.

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You don't just pay state taxes when you have a school aged child.