School Choice Lawsuit Stalls For Now
August 17th, 2016 by flanewsPublic school teachers were dealt another blow in their fight against school choice. As Matt Galka tells us, the latest court ruling siding with state tax credit scholarships gives the state’s largest teacher’s union one more option – Florida’s Supreme Court.
They rallied and they put a full on ad blitz on tv, and now the 1st District Court of Appeals has sided with school choice advocates and stopped the lawsuit against Florida’s tax credit scholarship program for now.
Ron Meyer represents the Florida Education Association and says they still believe public schools are being harmed with less funding despite the ruling.
“We don’t agree that there is no special injury when, as we said in the complaint of this lawsuit, hundreds of millions of dollars are being taken from the public fisk, with student leaving the public schools to go to these unregulated voucher schools,” he said.
The FEA has said in the past they’d be willing to take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
“We are reviewing to see if the Supreme Court should have the final say,” said Meyer.
But school choice advocate and Tallahassee pastor R.B. Holmes says he hopes it doesn’t go that far. He argues that more than 90,000 students would have been out of luck had the ruling gone the other way.
“School started this week, and you’ve got close to 100,000 students that are using these scholarships, that would be a travesty,” he said.
Advocates say the program mostly helps minority low income families who’s children were being failed by public schools. The tax credit scholarship program is expected to cost just under $560 million dollars this year.
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