The Louisiana Legislature’s leadership said lawmakers are likely to eliminate funding for Gov. Jeff Landry’s signature education initiative: an expanded school voucher program called LA GATOR that would devote millions more in tax dollars to private education.
Legislators are under pressure to find money to replace $2,000 and $1,000 stipends that public school teachers and support staff, respectively, have received for the past two years.
To avoid a teacher pay cut next year, lawmakers will have to find an extra $198 million in the state budget. Diverting $50 million from the new LA GATOR program seems like an obvious choice, a few legislative leaders have said in interviews over the past two weeks.
“A lot of members still want to do the teacher stipend,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, who oversees building of the state budget. “For me, it’s going to be challenging” to fund the LA GATOR program on top of the stipends.
Yet cutting LA GATOR would scuttle one of Landry’s most significant legislative accomplishments since taking office last year. The Republican governor has been celebrating the new voucher program for months, even lighting the State Capitol and Superdome up with its trademark red color earlier this year.
“That was the governor’s educational priority on the campaign trail,” Louisiana Education Superintendent Cade Brumley, who also pushed LA GATOR, said in an interview Wednesday. “Both literally and symbolically, that’s an important program to him.”
How much of the teacher stipend can legislators restore?
Eliminating school voucher expansion this year won’t guarantee educators get their full stipends. The $50 million LA GATOR money only covers about a quarter of what’s needed for the extra pay.
Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said lawmakers can’t fully commit to funding the stipends yet, even as he supports removing the $50 million from school vouchers.
“I think that just puts more pressure on us to be able to follow through on that whole amount” for stipends, Henry said.
The governor has been circumspect about whether he would support putting money for additional teacher pay in the budget, however.
“We’ll continue to look inside the budget to see what we can find, and we will see where it ends up,” Landry told reporters during a news conference Wednesday. “I’m making no commitment on that.”
The governor initially intended to launch LA GATOR while also making the stipends a permanent part of educators’ salaries this coming school year. But those plans were thwarted when state voters overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment in the March 29 election.
The Landry-backed Amendment 2 was supposed to produce extra savings for the state and local school districts that would have covered, in part, this pay for teachers and school support staff. But it also included dozens of other tax and budget policy changes unrelated to teacher salaries that many voters found difficult to understand. In the end, it failed to pass with 65% of votes cast against the proposal.
On Wednesday, Landry suggested the state’s 59,0000 public school teachers were, in part, to blame for the amendment failing, even though Louisiana’s two major teachers unions endorsed the measure.
“We hoped to answer that in a very fiscally conservative way with what we put in Amendment 2 but apparently the teachers didn’t like that,” Landry said during the press conference.
Still, Larry Carter, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, is cautiously optimistic at least some of the stipends will be restored. He’s just not sure how much.
“Nobody’s really locking any numbers down. I’m going to be honest,” Carter said Wednesday.
LA GATOR applications
Cutting LA GATOR might be awkward for Landry and lawmakers because families have already applied for slots in the program. Brumley said Wednesday 33,000 applications have been submitted since the state started accepting them March 1, and the period to sign up goes through Tuesday, April 15.
A little more than 5,000 of those applicants are low-income students who were enrolled in the existing school voucher program that started in 2012, according to information the education department provided Wednesday at a legislative hearing.
Those students – many of whom have received vouchers to attend Catholic schools for years – will be guaranteed their private school tuition funding regardless of whether the $50 million for LA GATOR is removed.
Henry and McFarland said they have no intention of cutting that allocation. Covering those 5,000 students would cost about $43 million on top of the $50 million meant for the LA GATOR expansion, Brumley said.
Should it stay in the budget, the extra $50 million for LA GATOR would give 6,000 more students private education vouchers, for a total of 11,000 slots, Brumley said.
LA GATOR awards are also designed to be more flexible than the state’s traditional voucher program. Accepted families could use the state dollars to cover private school tuition or other expenses for private school students, such as uniforms and tutoring.
But with limited space, two out of every three students who have applied for the grants so far would be turned down, even if the $50 million for LA GATOR remained in the budget.
The program is designed to eventually be open to students of all income levels, though with so few slots available for next school year, priority would be given to students with disabilities and children from low-income families, Brumley said
More than 80% of applicants – around 26,700 people – fall below the income threshold of 250% above the federal poverty line to receive preferential treatment, which is an $80,000 annual income for a family of four. A little over 2,400 are also students with disabilities, according to the state education department.
Within the new low-income and students with disabilities applicant pool, people would be given the vouchers on a “first-come, first-serve” basis, Brumley said. Families who submitted applications at the beginning of the cycle would be more likely to receive a grant for their child.
Daniel Erspamer, a LA GATOR advocate and head of the conservative Pelican Institute think tank, said legislators should be wary of cutting funding for a program that has proven to be popular.
“Even at current funding that is in the governor’s executive budget, we would still have a significant wait list,” Erspamer said in an interview. “That is going to be something that the Legislature has to reckon with.”
Rural students left out of LA GATOR
There’s also skepticism from some of the legislative leadership that their own constituents would benefit from the LA GATOR program.
While every legislator has public school teachers who live in their district, some don’t have private schools where their constituents could use a LA GATOR grant.
At Wednesday’s legislative hearing with Brumley, McFarland pointed out no one had applied to the LA GATOR program from Winn Parish, which is part of his House district. McFarland himself lives in Jackson Parish, which had just 12 applicants, according to education department data.
McFarland and Henry have also questioned whether there were enough seats in existing private schools to absorb 6,000 more students.
“I understand and appreciate you have a lot of applicants, and I understand why. But if the seats aren’t available, then why would I appropriate the other dollars for the program?” McFarland asked Brumley.
Other lawmakers told Brumley they simply did not feel comfortable cutting teacher pay in a year when the state has made historic education gains. Last year, Louisiana students moved up dozens of spots in national rankings on reading comprehension tests, an unheard-of achievement in the state that Landry and lawmakers have repeatedly touted.
“Our student achievement would not have taken place if it had not been for the hard work of our teachers,” said Rep. Barbara Freiberg, R-Baton Rouge, a former educator who supports retaining the full stipend.