By Aaron Sanderford
OMAHA — Heated allegations were lodged Thursday by advocates for and against a petition drive seeking to overturn Nebraska’s new tax credit for donations funding private school scholarships.
Public school advocates are crisscrossing the state seeking signatures for a petition that would let voters decide the fate of the K-12 scholarship law.
They are often confronted by signature blockers for Keep Kids First, a local school choice group with national backing. The blockers try to persuade people not to sign petitions for Support Our Schools, a group backed by local, state and national teachers unions.
On Thursday, the groups accused one another of telling half-truths or lies or turning off potential voters in Omaha, Lincoln and other communities. Petition circulators and blockers shared specific allegations and said voters are paying the price.
Questions about circulators
Dueling concerns emerged from a news conference Thursday at Memorial Park, held by tax credit supporters, who criticized petition circulators they said went too far. Some opponents of the tax credit watched the gathering and shared allegations against signature blockers.
By day’s end, advocates for and against the tax credit program shared cell phone videos online of circulators or blockers misstating what the petition does or misstating what signing the petition might do.
Longtime school choice advocate Clarice Jackson of Omaha, who testified to the Legislature in support of the scholarship tax credit, spoke about her experience with a Support Our Schools petitioner standing outside a local Dollar Tree.
She said the circulator told her she should sign the petition if she wants “opportunity scholarships for minority families.” The petition seeks to put the new law on the 2024 ballot so voters have the option of rejecting the tax credit.
“I asked her several times to make sure I … understood what she was saying and she repeated it again,” Jackson said. “Those who had signed that bill at that Dollar Tree were very upset, because they didn’t get the right information.”
Tim Royers of the Nebraska State Education Association told reporters that his organization fired the rogue circulator Jackson encountered on the same night.
He said Support Our Schools had checked with the Secretary of State’s Office and had received no formal complaints about their circulators. Organizers said such complaints have been lodged in other states facing school choice fights.
Questions about blockers
Royers criticized petition blockers for invading the personal space of people trying to explain what the petitions would do. He said three incidents involving blockers resulted in calls to police. He said Nebraskans should get to vote on the law in 2024.
“We’ve had Decline to Sign employees physically get nose-to-nose with our volunteers,” Royers said. “If a person’s coming up to try and sign a petition, they’ll physically intervene and try and physically stop them from signing the petition.”
Some blockers, circulators said, have yelled while voters are trying to read or hear petition language. Lincoln circulator Christina Grosshans said she was seeking signatures at a public library when a blocker became “disruptive and belligerent” to people who tried to sign and interrupted her while she was trying to talk. People complained to the librarian, who let the blocker know his behavior was unacceptable and he “settled down,” Grosshans said.
Jackson, who told reporters that her child had struggled with dyslexia and learning to read, confronted Royers at Thursday’s event. She asked what she was supposed to do when the public school system could not provide what her child needed.
Royers said option enrollment offers parents a way to find a more responsive school if they can’t get help where they are. Royers, a Millard Public Schools teacher for years, declined to criticize a school or its efforts without knowing details.
Public schools, he said, have to serve every student, and not every child has a parent who can advocate on their behalf. For parents of children with special needs, he said, private schools often work with public school special educators.
Choice is not an attack, supporter of law says
Tanya Santos, principal of Holy Name Catholic School in Omaha, said private and public schools partner regularly to help students with special needs. She supports both types of schools, she said, but prefers giving parents a choice.
Scholarships, she said, aren’t an attack on public schools or their funding. Many states adopt scholarship programs, however, as a first step toward voucher programs in which money follows a student, other supporters of the tax credit acknowledged.
Lauren Garcia, campaign manager for Keep Kids First, said other states adopting scholarship programs eventually embraced school voucher programs, but not all. She had led the Nebraska chapter of the American Federation for Children, the local branch of a national group backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Support Our Schools Nebraska has also received national support from the National Education Association.
Angie Lauritsen of Save Our Schools emphasized that private school access doesn’t necessarily mean equal access. She said, for example, her special needs child, who was nonverbal, was turned away from a parochial preschool.
Jackson’s experience with a circulator was one of a handful of videos Keep Kids First posted on its new website www.soslies.com. The group said it is trying to crowdsource complaints about petition complaints and explain what the law does.
Funding fight over tax break, impact
Legislative Bill 753, signed into law May 30, provides dollar-for-dollar income tax credits of up to $100,000 for people and corporations funding scholarships.
The law caps total revenue that can be claimed at $25 million a year for three years. The total could rise by the tenth year to $100 million a year. Critics say this money might have otherwise gone to public schools. Defenders say the same could be argued about any tax credit.
Both sides sharply criticized the other about misstating the way the tax credit program could impact schools. Supporters of the tax credit said public school backers make it sound like the credit will take money directly away from public schools.
They and the Platte Institute point out the Legislature also passed an education funding package that pledged to build a $1 billion Education Future Fund to cover more special education costs and provide a baseline level of state aid for every public K-12 district.
But Support Our Schools Nebraska and the OpenSky Policy Institute argue that the new funding, while welcome, might not be sustainable and would not insulate school districts from a program that could balloon over 10 years to 10% of what the state spent last year on TEEOSA state aid to K-12 schools.
Signatures due Aug. 30
Circulators have until Aug. 30 to submit roughly 61,000 valid signatures of registered voters. Petition drive organizers often gather tens of thousands more than they need for a safety net.
Garcia, with Nebraska Federation for Children, which supports the tax credits, said she understands that voters might be overwhelmed by the amount of information they are being bombarded with about the actions of circulators and blockers because “there’s a lot of passion and emotion on both sides of the issue.”
“Although we want everybody to be peaceful, obviously things are going to happen. Incidents on both sides might occur,” Garcia said. “We’re humans, after all.”