Separation of church and state? Ha! I live in Missouri, a state with a 20 year GOP supermajority. A supermajority who have defunded schools for a least a decade and are now pushing to privatize Missouri public schools using a voucher scheme known as “Empowerment Scholarships” to funnel taxpayer money to private religious schools.
I was a public school teacher for 16 years and most of that time was spent in small, rural schools. My children attended Missouri rural schools and I graduated from a rural public school. These schools are in trouble.
Missouri ranks 49th in the nation for educational funding, only sending 38% of a school’s budget while the rest must be made up of property and sales tax from a community. Missouri ranks 50th in starting teacher pay with the state minimum stuck at 25K per year (yes, you read that right.) So, what in the world is going on in Missouri? In summary, the school choice lobby entered the chat at least a decade ago.
In my part of the state, The Herzog Foundation is doing the heavy lifting of privatizing schools. Their website states their mission is to, “catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education so that families and culture flourish.”
Even more, the foundation seems to be accelerating the development of “school choice” legislators
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As reported in The Missouri Independent, “The (Herzog) Foundation is barred from direct electoral activity because it is a charity, but businesses and political entities connected to Herzog continue pouring money into campaigns — spending more than $3.6 million on campaigns for state office since 2019, according to Missouri Ethics Commission filings.”
While the foundation donates to the coffers of legislators and nominees through PACs, let me tell you about one legislator; his name is Josh Hurlbert.
Josh Hurlbert is not only employed as a Scholarship Coordinator for the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation, an organization that was created to distribute Missouri tax dollars to the scholarship program, but Josh also serves as a Missouri State Representative.
Hurlbert’s House Committees include the “Subcommittee on Appropriations - Education.”
A-P-P-R-O-P-R-I-A-T-I-O-N-S.
I decided to comb through some of the bills proposed by Representative Hurlbert. Here are a few:
Do you notice anything? Like, a preoccupation with the expansion of the ‘Empowerment scholarship” program in Missouri? It seems so strange that a State Representative, working in a district with great public schools, would lean so far into siphoning taxpayer money into private schools. Weird.
The point of all of the defunding and shuffling of taxpayer money private schools? To allow taxpayer money to flow to private and religious schools. To profit from taxpayer funds by funneling money from one of the biggest line item expenses in state budgets; education. To allow the religious indoctrination of children, funded by the taxpayers. To enrich the already wealthy by picking the pockets of the rest of us.
And, with a dollar-for-dollar tax break for individuals and corporations purchasing Empowerment Scholarships, this looks a little like a tax shelter.
You know that this little post wasn’t nearly enough to talk about what’s going on in Missouri with our schools. The defunding has led to 30% of Missouri school district to go to a 4-day-week. It has switched the economic burden to rural and poor folks looking for daycare one day a week. I will to speak on this issue again.
Another day in Missouri.
Jess