By a unanimous vote Monday night, Oak Ridge City Council approved a resolution against taxpayers funding private schools through school vouchers unless certain commitments are met.

By a unanimous vote Monday night, Oak Ridge City Council approved a resolution against taxpayers funding private schools through school vouchers unless certain commitments are met.

During the meeting at the Municipal Building, two Oak Ridge citizens spoke in favor of Council adopting the resolution opposing a voucher system.

“I think it’s a public good that we all benefit from,” said Marian Wildgruber, who lives on Connors Drive, regarding public schools. She said she was against giving tax dollars to private schools which she called “often questionable businesses” that do not always accept special needs students and often reject students with behavioral issues.

She also began to say she was “very upset” with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos's lack of experience with public education, but Mayor Warren Gooch stopped her, saying citizens could not make “purely political statements.”

“Even if a voucher system was going to be effective, Oak Ridge is not the model for that,” said Pastor Derrick Hammond of Oak Valley Baptist Church. He said a school voucher system would be “particularly destructive” given the structure of the Oak Ridge school system.

Another resident, Gary McGhee of Morningside Drive, asked about liability for children's education and whether the city or school system would still have any legal liability under a voucher system.

City Manager Mark Watson said currently the city Board of Education is liable for education in Oak Ridge while City Council's only responsibility is to fund the schools. He said, however, he is not sure how a future voucher system might work if it was eventually adopted.

During the meeting's discussion of the issue with City Council, Watson said state Rep. Kent Calfeeand state Sen. Ken Yaeger, both Republicans from Kingston, are against voucher programs that do not meet the standards set forth in the resolution. However, he said state Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, is not against vouchers. He said vouchers might work for “a child in a school system that may need some help,” but “it has to be well thought through and that's not what's occurring.”

Vice Mayor Rick Chinn said it was “extremely important for us to pass this motion.” He said he had expressed the concerns about vouchers to legislators during a recent trip to Nashville connected to an artificial turf grant for Blankenship Field.

In response to a question from Council member Hans Vogel, Mayor Gooch said Oak Ridge Schools have the highest per pupil expenditure in the area by “several thousand dollars” based on figures published in The Knoxville News Sentinel.

“Whatever the voucher amount might be in theory, in all likelihood there's no way it would cover the per pupil expenditure,” he said. “I strongly support this resolution.”

Council member Ellen Smith also spoke in favor of the resolution.

The Resolution

Oak Ridge Board of Education passed the same resolution Nov. 28, 2017.

As with the previous School Board resolution, the Council's resolution states that no private schools should receive public funds, “without statutory assurance that schools receiving the funds will comply to the same curriculum and testing standards of public schools and until the Basic Education Program is adequately funded by the Tennessee General Assembly.”

The cover letter to the resolution, signed by the Board of Education, focuses on the first part of that statement, making sure all schools follow the same standards.

“We simply ask that no voucher program be created until schools receiving public funds be subject to the same requirements and accountability standards as public schools,” it stated.

“My problem is we have trouble competing with private schools on a level playing field,” Board member Angi Agle, who presented the bill, said at the Board meeting, referring to the lack of standards applying to private schools which apply to public ones.

While mentioning that aspect in his report to City Council, Watson focused more on the financial issues involved in vouchers. He stated the the Tennessee Lgislature has been considering a voucher system “for many years.”

“The city of Oak Ridge, as one of the 27 (city) public school systems in Tennessee, controlled by contributions and oversighted in some way by the municipality is vitally concerned about the impact that such a change would have on the community,” he stated.

He summarized the system as allowing “a freedom of choice for all students to choose to leave their geographically-centered public school to another school, taking the allocated funds for that public school system to the 'new' school system, be it public or private.”

“As a municipal school system, Oak Ridge finds that diversionary impacts on the educational costs within our city or the loss of students to adjacent academies or private religious schools will exceed the capacity of our community to pay for and (it will) cast the burden onto others or the state,” he said. He said the city of Oak Ridge, “does not accept that the state is ready to assume the social, financial and administrative burdens” associated with the change.

He said the city “prides itself” on its investment in the school system.

“Because the city of Oak Ridge has such an outstanding school system, we can envision a school system that is chosen by participants in a school voucher program and only paying a portion of the costs borne by the general taxpayer of Oak Ridge. The city questions where this deficiency will be made up for in the planned voucher program. Or, will municipal taxpayers have to absorb this cost? Such legislation must be addressed and funded. Unfunded mandates are not acceptable,” he said.

Contact Ben Pounds at (865) 220-5502 and follow him on Twitter @Bpoundsjournal.