Kentucky Amendment 2: Why private schools support the measure

Trisha Siegelstein didn’t hesitate to voice her disappointment in her alma mater after seeing Assumption High’s Facebook post last week in support of Amendment 2.

A 1998 graduate of the private school in Louisville, she quickly found email addresses for its administrators and warned them her donations to the institution would cease if it were to start benefiting from public dollars.

“If AHS truly cares about the community at large, they should care that children in public schools get the funding they need and not have it diverted to private schools,” she wrote them that same day.

In response, Assumption President Mary Lang wrote, “You may disagree, but there is no amount of money that will fix JCPS. It’s a broken system which continuously struggles.”

“Allowing all families, no matter their means, the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their child and not be limited to attending an underperforming school to me signifies our compassion for the less fortunate,” Lang continued in an email Siegelstein shared with The Courier Journal.

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In recent weeks, Amendment 2 has increasingly become a fierce topic of debate, with both public and private school supporters ramping up efforts to sway voters to their sides.

However, while Kentucky's public schools have been prohibited from voicing their opinions on the constitutional amendment, private schools across Louisville have openly supported the measure, which could lead to the creation of a school voucher program that could allow tax dollars to be spent on private school tuition.

Signs urging voters to support the amendment have popped up at some of the city's costliest private schools, including Trinity, DeSales and Assumption. The average tuition at those schools is $16,185 annually, or about 26% of the median household income in Louisville.

Many of the city's private schools are operated by the Archdiocese of Louisville, and several say they support the amendment because it could present an opportunity for families who can't otherwise afford to send their kids to private schools. Some have also acknowledged the amendment could help families who already attend their schools.

“Depending on which school choice options were passed, it could benefit our current families that are attending our Middletown campus and our Providence School,” Darin Long, superintendent of the Christian Academy School System, said when asked if it has space to enroll more students. While the two schools are near capacity, some grades or programs could enroll more students, he continued, but the school has “no plans for capacity expansion.”

Amendment 2 does not directly create a program or make changes to current funding levels for the state's public schools. However, if it passes, opponents believe it could give the Republican-led legislature free rein to establish a program that benefits wealthy families, while leaving public schools with less money to serve the commonwealth's neediest children.

In multiple states with voucher programs, including Indiana, the majority of families using a voucher are those already in private schools.

At a Courier Journal forum on Amendment 2, Jim Waters, president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, said not all private school families in Kentucky are wealthy, but rather there are many who are "greatly suffering" in order to provide their children with the best fit for their education."

Siegelstein, however, said private schools seeking money that would otherwise go to public schools “is really selfish and small minded, and that’s what comes out of extreme privilege, and I came from that background.”

“I really just want people to think about community,” she said as she started to tear up, explaining she wants people to care about all children, not just their own.

Amendment 2 asks Kentucky voters whether or not the state should be allowed to direct tax dollars toward education outside the public school system.

Debate about the amendment and who could voice an opinion on it ramped up in August, when national school choice proponents took notice of social media posts made by a south central Kentucky school district, accusing it of breaking the law.

Pulaski County Schools, which serves roughly 7,500 students in and around Somerset, placed an image on its website and Facebook page warning that Amendment 2 will "harm" the district.

In response, Kentucky's top prosecutor released an advisory stating public school district resources and social media may not be used to advocate for or against constitutional amendments or to express "any partisan political message."

The advisory has not stopped public school leaders from expressing their opposition after hours, with superintendents hosting evening press conferences and submitting opinion pieces to local media.

However, the fact that Pulaski and other public school districts have been restricted from taking a stance on Amendment 2 shows the playing field is not fair, Jefferson County Teachers Association President Maddie Shepard said.

“Public schools, who educate 90% of Kentucky kids, have not been fully funded by the state in years and fight for funding every year,” Shepard wrote in a statement. “They are legally not allowed to advocate for themselves to retain funding and defeat Amendment 2. Meanwhile, private schools, who choose their students and do not have the same accountability requirements as public schools, legally are allowed to advocate for more funding by way of siphoning funding from public schools via Amendment 2.”

For several decades, the Catholic church has advocated for "school choice programs to provide social uplift to the economically vulnerable and to empower low-income families to benefit from some of the same choices wealthier families enjoy," Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre with the Archdiocese of Louisville told The Courier Journal.

The archdiocese runs 48 schools in seven counties. While some are at capacity, others have room to grow, according to Mary Beth Bowling, the system's superintendent. She did not clarify which of the schools could enroll more students.

Louisville residents have a strong history of supporting Catholic schools. But vouchers have been a "financial life-saver" for the schools nationally, according to Adam Laats, a professor at New York's Binghamton University, who is an expert in the history of education and battles over education culture.

Parishes have struggled to keep schools open and have seen their enrollments decline drastically in recent years nationwide. Just since 2014, about 600 Catholic schools have closed or consolidated. Today they serve about 1.7 million students, a sharp decline from the 5.6 million students they served in 1965.

Wisconsin’s voucher program, though, is attributed to saving Milwaukee’s Catholic schools, with a report finding each received about $1 million per year from the program in 2012.

Laats likened today’s school choice landscape to the aftermath of court-ordered integration that temporarily led some southern states to give white families funding to attend private, segregated schools.

Once that practice ended, many of those schools “didn’t survive for financial reasons, but if you can get voucher money, if you can get (education savings account) money, if you can be a charter school and just be on the state budget, that is radically different,” he said.

Contact reporter Krista Johnson at [email protected].