OPINION: The referendum is the ultimate answer to the school voucher fight in Idaho
The voucher vultures are circling the Idaho treasury, expecting to soon have government approval to gorge on money paid into the treasury by hard-working Idahoans. They want the money to be used to subsidize the private/religious education of about 36,000 Idaho kids who don’t go to public schools. If the state subsidized the education of all of those kids at $5,000, each, it would be a $180,000,000 hit on the treasury. The money would come directly out of the public school appropriation. The rural areas where no private/church schools exist would be especially hard hit.
The voucher vultures are a collection of out-of-state, dark-money groups that want to weaken the nation’s public schools for the benefit of private/religious schooling. Dark money donors include two Texas Christian-nationalist billionaire preachers, Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, who managed this year to defeat conservative Republicans in rural Texas who have strongly opposed school voucher schemes. Wilks and his brother are known to Idahoans for buying and closing off vast tracts of land in our Valley County.
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