The Pennsylvania School Board Association in a recent announcement pressed state legislators to oppose a proposed law that will require the adoption of a voucher program.

Under the bill, it says, any school district that does not “provide full-time in-person instruction or denies a student full-time in-person instruction” would be required to establish a voucher for students to use at any public or nonpublic school.

If the bill were to be passed into law, the voucher program would be implemented in the middle of the current school year with little, if any, options for school districts to absorb the impact of the lost revenue. Moreover, the bill contains no time limit on the applicability of the voucher program, meaning that even if full-time in-person instruction were re-established the mandate to offer vouchers would never end. Additionally, the bill does not contemplate necessary temporary closure of individual school buildings due to localized COVID-19 outbreaks, or even non-health related issues such as building damage from the recent tropical storm that swept through parts of the state.

PSBA Chief Executive Officer Nathan Maines said, “Not only is the bill vague and overly broad, but it serves to establish a foundation that will chip away at Pennsylvania’s public education system by creating a permanent voucher program that could be expanded in the future.”

As written, the bill would provide any student living in a school district, even students who are not enrolled in a district school or are enrolled in a district school not impacted by school closure, with a voucher if the school district were forced to cancel in-person instruction even for a single day. Yet, the bill contains no requirement that the school receiving a student using a voucher provide full-time in-person instruction.

Mains said, “If the intent of the bill is to make sure students have access to in-person instruction, it’s inconsistent that the bill contains no requirement that the voucher actually be used for that purpose. The legislature should be doing all it can to support public schools during a global pandemic, yet instead this bill would take advantage of current challenges to establish an expansive, permanent voucher program.”

Bethlehem Area School District Superintendent Dr. Joseph Roy agrees with PSBA’s assessment, telling the Press, “This is a naked political ploy by legislative majority leaders to further divert public dollars away from public schools and to private/parochial schools. The fact that some legislators are exploiting the pandemic to further undermine public schools is particularly distasteful.”