Focus on ‘schools’ eligible for vouchers
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The recent filing of a lawsuit against the state’s new private school voucher scheme by the NCAE and the N.C. Justice Center on behalf of 25 plaintiffs received a flurry of media attentionbn — and it should have.
There’s a compelling case that diverting public money to private schools violates the state constitution. The courts will ultimately decide if that is true. But the mechanics of the voucher program have received far less attention by the media, as has the almost complete lack of accountability in the program.
Almost 700 private and religious schools currently qualify for state money under the voucher scheme that parents will begin applying for Feb. 1.
And as Lindsay Wagner with N.C. Policy Watch has reported, the schools themselves have to meet very few requirements to be eligible to receive public funding.
Wagner’s recent story highlighted Paramount Christian Academy in Davidson County, a school with three students and one teacher that appears to functioning as much as a home school as a private academy. The school may not even meet the minimal requirements. Officials in the state Office of Non-Public Schools had no record that the school was ever visited and couldn’t produce any information about safety inspections.
Yet Paramount is on the current list of private schools that may receive vouchers next fall.
Paramount also uses fundamentalist textbooks that teach students that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.
All that is apparently fine under the voucher scheme, as is openly discriminating against gay students and their families. A private school in Wilmington eligible for the voucher money recently announced that gay students would not be admitted to the school and neither would students with gay parents.
The school later decided not to participate in the voucher program but many religious schools eligible for