One of the measures that will appear on the November 5 ballot is a referendum to repeal LB1402, otherwise known as Nebraska’s school choice bill. A vote to repeal on Measure 435 would effectively end the school choice program started by LB1402. Because all families must pay property taxes to their local public school district, I believe parents should be given the opportunity to choose where to send their children to school. Therefore, I support voting to retain Measure 435.

The education lobby has been hammering the airwaves and the Internet with commercials that are designed to garner support to repeal the new school choice law in Nebraska, but these advertisements are very misleading. Therefore, I would like to begin by exposing the three most misleading statements that are being spread about Nebraska’s school choice law.

The organization Support Our Schools Nebraska is currently running advertisements which say that LB1402 “shifts money from public schools to private schools” and that monies appropriated to pay for private schools “could force cuts to public schools to pay for it.” These statements simply are not true. These statements are false because public school districts are funded by local property tax dollars, not through the State’s General Fund. Property taxes are paid to the county, not to the State. In order for these statements to be true, the primary source of funding for public school districts would have to be the same as the source of funding for educational scholarships, and they are not the same. To the contrary, LB1402 appropriates $10 million per year from the State’s General Fund to the State Treasurer for the purpose of providing educational scholarships to students attending private schools. As long as public schools continue to receive their funding locally, and not from the State, there is no direct connection between funding for public schools and funding for educational scholarships.

Support Our Schools Nebraska also misleads the public by insinuating that LB1402 provides no oversight over monies paid to private schools. The advertisement says, “The voucher bill spends $100 million on private schools over ten years with no accountability or oversight of our tax dollars.” That statement is false because LB1402 does not spend any money on private schools; instead, the money is given to students in the form of scholarship grants. In other words, the program funds students rather than schools, which is the way it ought to be.

Finally, Support Our Schools Nebraska makes use of fear mongering tactics in order to scare voters into voting to repeal Measure 435. For example, Support Our Schools Nebraska is currently running an advertisement which says that Nebraska’s school choice program will cause Nebraska’s public schools to have “larger class sizes, fewer resources, less teacher pay, and higher property taxes.” Support Our Schools Nebraska ties their argument once again to how the school choice program receives its funding. The fact of the matter is that Support Our Schools Nebraska cannot validate any of their disastrous predictions about public education in Nebraska without first admitting that there is no connection whatsoever between how the school choice program is funded versus how public schools are funded. There is no way for their disastrous predictions to come true because the school choice program receives its money from the State and never intrudes on local funding for the public schools.

As you can see, the organization Support Our Schools Nebraska has not dealt forthrightly with voters concerning Measure 435. Educators love to brag about how well public education is doing in Nebraska. For example, you may have heard recently about how Nebraska’s students have out-performed their peers in other states on the ACT exam. While that statement is technically true, Nebraska’s ACT scores have been consistently falling over the years. For instance, when I first became a Nebraska State Senator eight years ago, the average ACT score in Nebraska was 21.5. This year’s average was only 19.1! So, rather than taking money away from students who want to attend a private school and better their education, shouldn’t we be holding our public schools accountable for failing Nebraska’s students? Nebraska needs school choice. On November 5, please vote to retain Measure 435.