Funding for the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF), more commonly referred to as the DC voucher program, is likely to run out at the end of next academic year due to a sunset provision designed by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin (D). DC Vouchers were established by Congress in 2003 and serve around 2,000 local low-income students.
Speaking at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) the Executive Director of DC Parents for School Choice expressed her intention to fight for continued funding of the scholarship program.
“I got a call last night, late last night. It was from a parent who has four children in the scholarship program and he said to me ‘Virginia, what are going to do if we lose this program?’ and I said ‘we not going to lose. We’re going to fight,’” said Virginia Walden Ford on February 28.
“We are doing everything we can, getting the word out, but the reality is we could lose,” she later added. “Now, I can’t tell that to 2,000 parents.”
She said, “I have to be strong and stay tough and say we’re going to win but I’m also going to be the person that if we do lose, is going to have to say to those parents ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do. I don’t know where your kids are going to go to school,’ because they’re going to look to their leadership to find answers.”
The Omnibus bill in both houses of Congress provides WSF with one additional year of funding, at which point new revenue would have to be appropriated by Congress and approved by the DC City Council.
Ford considers the City Council hostile to the voucher program. She also pointed out that the DC’s Deputy Youth Mayor for Legislative Affairs, Ronald Holassie, is an Opportunity Scholarship recipient and that “two other children on the Advisory Council” are in the program as well.
“I think that’s very telling and I think it says what this program can do to these kids because I know these neighborhoods and I know how difficult it has been for [them] with their parents,” she said.
Ford was joined on stage by two other school choice advocates, Jeanne Allen from the Center for Education Reform and Kevin D. Roberts of the Catholic Family Caucus.
Allen, a Montgomery County resident, complained that “just six years after vouchers got to Milwaukee…we are still fighting for a measly 1800 children [in our] nation’s capital to get t he money that we all pay in taxes so they can actually go to a good school as opposed to a failed crappy school” in the District. She argued that the current national fight for school choice is “not the fault” of Democrats or Republicans, but “it is our fault that we have not made a cogent, sales-related pithy appealing pitch for school choice across the country.”
DC schools are far from safe. Jennifer Marshal, Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, said in her introduction that “here in our nation’s capital barely half the students graduate from public school and one out of every eight report being assaulted or injured with a deadly weapon.”
“For this, the District of Columbia spends $14,000 per student. $14,000 is well above the national average.”
The average student in the U.S. costs school districts around $9,769, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
