Ms. DeVos introduced the measure in a letter to the Council of Chief State College Officers, which represents state training chiefs, defending her
Ms. DeVos introduced the measure in a letter to the Council of Chief State College Officers, which represents state training chiefs, defending her place on how training funding from the Coronavirus Assist, Aid and Financial Safety Act, or CARES Act, needs to be spent.
“The CARES Act is a particular, pandemic-related appropriation to profit all American college students, lecturers and households,” Ms. DeVos wrote within the letter on Friday. “There may be nothing within the act suggesting Congress meant to discriminate between kids based mostly on public or nonpublic faculty attendance, as you appear to do. The virus impacts everybody.”
A variety of training officers say Ms. DeVos’s steering would divert thousands and thousands of {dollars} away from deprived college students and drive districts starved of tax revenues throughout an financial disaster to assist even the wealthiest personal faculties. The affiliation representing the nation’s faculties superintendents advised districts to disregard the steering, and at the very least two states — Indiana and Maine — mentioned they might.
Ms. DeVos accused the state training chiefs of getting a “reflex to share as little as attainable with college students and lecturers exterior of their management,” and mentioned she would draft a rule codifying her place to “resolve any points in loads of time for the subsequent faculty 12 months.” The proposed rule would want to undergo a public remark course of earlier than it might take impact.
Non-public faculty leaders, who serve about 5.7 million of the nation’s kids, say they too are in disaster. Enrollment and tuition revenues are plunging together with philanthropic donations and church collections that assist some spiritual faculties function. Lots of these faculties serve low-income college students whose dad and mom have fled failing public faculties. Non-public faculty teams say 30 p.c of the households they serve have annual incomes beneath $75,000, and people households are most at-risk with out federal assist.
“I don’t perceive why we’ve to choose winners and losers when all the pieces we’re asking for is focused at serving to kids and households,” mentioned Jennifer Daniels, affiliate director for public coverage for america Convention of Catholic Bishops.
Underneath federal training legislation, faculty districts are required to make use of funding meant for his or her poorest college students to offer “equitable providers,” akin to tutoring and transportation, for low-income college students attending personal faculties of their districts. However Ms. DeVos maintains the coronavirus rescue legislation doesn’t restrict funding to simply poor college students, and her steering would award personal faculties extra providers than the legislation would usually require.
Democratic leaders referred to as on Ms. DeVos to revise her steering, which they mentioned would “repurpose tons of of thousands and thousands of taxpayer {dollars} meant for public faculty college students to offer providers for personal faculty college students, in contravention of each the plain studying of the statute and the intent of Congress.”
Carissa Moffat Miller, government director of the Council of Chief State College Officers, mentioned the group believed the secretary’s steering “might considerably hurt the susceptible college students who have been meant to profit essentially the most from the crucial federal Covid-19 training reduction funds Congress has supplied.”
Ms. DeVos has been unabashed in her use of coronavirus funding to additional her decades-long effort to divert public {dollars} to personal and parochial faculties. In a radio interview final week, first reported by Chalkbeat, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, asked Ms. DeVos if she was “utilizing this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done to our kids and the parents who choose to send them to faith-based schools.” She responded “Absolutely.”
In her letter, Ms. DeVos said “a growing list of nonpublic schools have announced they will not be able to reopen, and these school closures are concentrated in low-income and middle-class communities.”
At least 26 schools, the vast majority of them Catholic, have announced closures caused by or attributed to the pandemic, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization that is tracking such announcements. The National Catholic Educational Association said that at least 100 of its member schools are at risk of not reopening. More than 40 groups that support private schools wrote to House and Senate leaders this month asking for tuition aid, tax credits for families, and other measures to prevent “massive nonpublic school closures.”
Leaders in some religious communities say they cannot fall back on public education.
“It is unthinkable for us not to give our children a Jewish education, in the same way it is unthinkable for us not to keep the Sabbath or the kosher dietary laws — it is fundamental to Jewish life,” said Rabbi Abba Cohen, vice president for federal affairs at Agudath Israel of America, one of the groups that signed the letter.
Earlier this month, the Archdiocese of Newark announced it would close ten schools. While the organization said a plan to consolidate had already been underway, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, wrote in a letter to the community that “this historical moment presents crucial challenges to the sustainability and ongoing success of our schools.”
Among the closed schools was Cristo Rey Newark High School, part of a network of 37 Catholic college-preparatory schools across the country that exclusively serves low-income students.
“My concern is that people are painting this with a very large brush stroke that’s based on an assumption that Catholic and private means fancy and expensive, and that is not the case,” said Elizabeth Goettl, the president of the Cristo Rey Network.
Ninety-eight percent of the network’s 12,000 students are students of color, and all of them are from a financially disadvantaged family, Ms. Goettl said. Only 10 percent of the schools’ operational revenue comes from tuition, and every family pays what they can on a sliding scale, on average about $900 a year, though some pay as little as $20 a month.
Fifty percent of the school’s operational revenue comes from a corporate work-study program that could be impacted by the economic fallout from the pandemic. Companies employ students in entry-level jobs, and students assign their wages to their tuition.
“They’re literally earning their education at age 14, which is remarkable in itself,” she said. “For the federal government to say we’re not going to help your kids sanitize, or do whatever Covid-related things that need to be done, seems reprehensible.”
A recently passed House bill would limit private schools from accessing any new emergency relief funding, including equitable services. But private school leaders have launched an aggressive campaign to lobby Congress and the White House.
“When all is said and done, people are going to try to do the right thing and not try to pick which students we’re not going to keep safe,” said Michael Schuttloffel, the executive director of the Council for American Private Education.
Private school groups lobbying Congress say that mass closures would also hurt public schools. If 20 percent of private school students have to be absorbed into the public school system, it would cost the public system roughly $15 billion, according to estimates from those groups.
Public school groups said that the argument proves their point.
“I think it’s more proof that we need to be focused on public education, because if public education is not fully funded, there is no fall back,” said Maggie Garrett, co-chairwoman of the National Coalition for Public Education, which represents more than 50 national organizations that oppose private school vouchers.
Ruth Arias, an Amazon warehouse worker and single mother of five in New York City, said moving her children back to their neighborhood school would mean taking them “out of a place where they feel their best, and putting them into a school system where they fall apart.”
With the help of an organization called the Children’s Scholarship Fund, Ms. Arias said she enrolled her children in a private Christian school to “believe in something better.”
Ms. Arias was battling the coronavirus last month when she saw that the city’s Department of Education would help students get iPads for remote learning.
Having only one computer and a cellphone for her children to share, she was relieved — until she was told her children’s private schooling made them ineligible.
“I honestly had one thought,” she said, “which I had a lot when I was dealing with the public school system: Are you kidding me?”