School choice supporters scored another victory this week when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the tax-credit scholarship program that Dalphine Wilson uses to send her two children to Catholic school is legal. The court ruled 8-1 that the two-year-old Alabama Accountability Act, which also includes a tax-credit voucher plan for low-income families, does not violate the state constitution. The teachers’ union, a state senator and a public school superintendent had pressed the case and had won in a lower court.
For Wilson it was a feeling of pure relief and happiness when the verdict was announced. She won’t have to move her 10-year-old son or her 7-year-old daughter out of Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, where the annual tuition is $6,200 for elementary students. “What works best is what suits that individual child,” she says. “Finances should not be an obstacle.”
The decision was also a victory for the Institute for Justice. Based in Arlington, Virginia, IJ got involved in the case in the
Dalphine Wilson and her children, Evelyn Eady and Grant Eady. Photo courtesy of Institute for... [+]
summer of 2013, just months after the law went into effect and faced immediate legal challenges. IJ Senior Attorney Bert Gall says the decision means that school choice is constitutional and won’t face further legal challenge because the Alabama Supreme Court is the final arbiter on state constitution issues.
State Senator Quinton Ross Jr., who was one of the plaintiffs, told FORBES that the decision was expected because the nine elected justices are all Republicans. “It came as no surprise to me,” says Ross, a Democrat from Montgomery. Ross says his problem with the program is not that the children get scholarships, but that the money comes from tax credits, which he argues drains revenue from the state.
The justices rejected that argument. “Traditional definitions for ‘appropriations’ do not extend to include tax credits,” the court ruled. “When the taxpayers contribute to scholarship-granting organizations, they spend their own money and not public revenue actually collected by the state.” The court cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings in rejecting the argument that the programs violate the legal notion of separation of church and state. They found that the programs are neutral with respect to religion and that the money flows to religious schools only after the private decisions of the individual parents. “In other words,” said the court, “the State’s interest in authorizing the tax credits in this case was not building or repairing places of worship or maintaining ministers and ministries.”
As of last month, about 175 private schools were participating in the scholarship program, and almost all of them have a religious affiliation, according to state records. The law allows individuals and businesses to get income-tax credits for donating to nine scholarship-granting organizations. The maximum in available credits is $25 million a year. In the other program, parents can take an income-tax credit equal to 80% of the average annual state cost at a public school. If the student previously attended a failing school, the other 20% goes to that school.
Wilson, a graduate of Auburn University, says she was 40 and newly divorced when her son, Grant, started having problems at a Montgomery public school. She had also been a substitute teacher there and “was not happy with what I saw.” A friend suggested St. Bede’s, one of the Montgomery Catholic campuses, even though Wilson and her children are not Catholic. She knew it was out of her reach financially, but she cut back on her spending and got into couponing. With some financial aid she was able to swing the tuition for her son. But she knew it would be impossible to find the money for her daughter, Evelyn, to join him when it was time for her to enroll in kindergarten.
That’s when she got a call from the school saying they were having a meeting to discuss a new scholarship program. Wilson says she had $22 in her wallet and the application fee was about $20. She went for it. Now, the tuition for both children is covered and she pays $40 a month for incidentals. The curriculum is demanding, she says, and they are “earning the money around the table” by working hard on their homework to earn good grades. “You have to prepare your children,” says Wilson in a phone call from Montgomery. “You want them to be confident, to hold their own. I want them to do better and you can’t do that without a solid education.”
Gall, who was the lead attorney on the case, says decisions in school-choice court cases are due in Colorado and North Carolina. He has seen a “flurry of litigation” as state legislatures continue to pass school-choice measures. “Like night follows day,” he says. In fact, an Alabama state legislative committee this week moved ahead with a plan to introduce charter schools. Alabama is one of only eight states that do not have charter schools. A slug-fest is expected.
“We must continue our fight against the creation of charters that will rob our community schools of funding and local control,” Anita Gibson, president of the Alabama Education Association, said in a statement last month. Gibson, who is a teacher as well as head of the teachers’ union, was one of the losing plaintiffs in the scholarship and voucher court case.
