Vouchers for private schools may add up to segregation in Georgia classrooms

There are troubling questions that arise from this data:

Will Georgia’s recently approved voucher system lessen segregation or promote even more?

Does our tax dollars going to promote church run schools run counter to the U.S. Constitution?

What will the effect of vouchers be on public school budgets?

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

Let’s address the segregation issue first.

In 1954, with the issue of school desegregation on the minds of Georgia’s politicians, the state approved a constitutional amendment permitting state funds to be utilized for private school vouchers. This fact says a lot about why vouchers were created in the first place.

Georgia’s General Assembly and Gov. Brian Kemp, a voucher advocate, approved a voucher program last year. This occurred despite a Georgia survey finding that, if vouchers negatively impact public schools, only 34.9% of residents approve their use, according to a poll commissioned by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute from the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs Survey Research Center.

To qualify, students must be in low-performing schools, with lower-income children given top priority. Under that law, $6,500 annually is given to parents by our state government so that their child can attend a private school. However, Georgia’s average yearly tuition for a private high school is $13,411. No low-income student can afford to go to a private school. Thus, upper and middle-class families will use the vouchers.

The median household income for a Black family in Georgia is $57,293 annually, and it’s $82,397 for white families, according to some research. Therefore, it would appear that the new voucher system will only exacerbate the very low proportion of Black students in private schools.

Let’s analyze the church-state implications of vouchers. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Per the Georgia ACLU: “This fundamental freedom is a major reason the U.S. has managed to avoid a lot of the religious conflicts that have torn so many other nations apart.”

In fact, the ACLU has long questioned the constitutionality of voucher systems. In a 1999 memo on the issue, the ACLU cited a long list of U.S. Supreme Court cases that supported the ACLU viewpoint. However, since the politicization of the Roberts court over the last two decades, the Supreme Court has become friendly toward our tax dollars going to fund parochial schools, which total 830 of our state’s 3,146 K-12 schools.

Finally, we have the question of where does voucher funding come from? Every school district has an annual budget consisting of fixed and variable costs. When revenue is removed from a school because it has fewer students, variable cost tends to go down eventually. For example, fewer teachers are needed. Some may be laid off. However, fixed costs remain the same. For example, building maintenance and utilities. Therefore, as the ACLU says, voucher programs are “drain(ing) the public schools of tens of millions of government tax dollars.”

In conclusion, it is hard to justify the voucher program from either a constitutional or practical perspective. Plus, vouchers exacerbate discrimination against Georgians of color. From both moral and fiscal perspectives, the governor and General Assembly must repeal this law.

Jack Bernard, a retired business executive and former chair of the Jasper County Commission and Republican Party, was the first director of health planning for Georgia.