Organizers expect enough signatures to ask Nebraska voters to repeal private school funding law

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Public school advocates believe they have enough signatures to ask Nebraska voters in November to repeal a law that provides taxpayer money for private school tuition, marking the latest twist in a long-running fight with state lawmakers who have repeatedly opposed efforts to let voters weigh in on the public funding plan.

Organizers of Support Our Schools, which has been furiously gathering petition signatures over the past nine weeks, say they expect to have more than the roughly 86,500 signatures needed by Wednesday to ask voters to repeal the private school funding law.

“I mean, I’m a nervous wreck,” Karen Kilgarin, an organizer with Support Our Schools, said days before the deadline. “One of our biggest challenges is that we’ve really only had 67 days this time around to meet the deadline.”

If the repeal measure is approved for the November ballot, organizers fully expect school choice supporters to file a lawsuit to try to thwart the referendum, said Tim Royers, a Support Our Schools organizer and Millard Public Schools teacher.

“We’re very confident that, should they choose to try and file a court challenge to get us off the ballot, we would successfully defeat that challenge,” Royers said.

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It’s the second time in a year public school advocates have had to carry out a signature-gathering effort to try to reverse a legislative measure to use public money for private school tuition. The first came last year, when Republicans who dominate the officially nonpartisan Nebraska Legislature passed a bill to allow corporations and individuals to divert millions of dollars they owe in state income taxes to nonprofit organizations. Those organizations would, in turn, award that money as private school tuition scholarships.

The private school scholarship program saw Nebraska follow several other red states — including Arkansas, Iowa and South Carolina — in enacting some form of private school choice, from vouchers to education savings account programs.

Before the measure was even enacted, Support Our Schools began organizing a petition effort, collecting far more signatures than was needed to ask voters to repeal the law.

But rather than letting Nebraska voters decide, school choice supporters sought to thwart the petition process. Omaha Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, who introduced the private school funding bill, first called on Secretary of State Bob Evnen to reject the ballot measure, saying it violated the state constitution that places the power of taxation solely in the hands of the Legislature.

When that failed, Linehan successfully pushed a new bill to dump the tax credit funding system and simply fund private school scholarships directly from state coffers. More significantly, because Linehan’s new bill repealed and replaced last year’s law, it rendered last year’s successful petition effort moot — perfecting what Linehan called an “end run” around the effort to have Nebraska voters decide whether public money can go to private schools.

That move is in line with a growing trend among Republican-dominated state legislatures to find ways to force through legislation they want, even when it’s opposed by a majority of voters. A number of those efforts center on citizen-led petitions for law changes.

“They know that this is not popular with the public,” Royers said. “They know that every time vouchers have gone on the ballot in other states, it’s been defeated.”

Supporters of school choice say it’s needed for students and their families who are failed by low-performing public schools — particularly low-income families unable to afford private school tuition on their own. Opponents say private school funding programs end up being too costly for states to maintain and undercut public schools. Some have also said it violates the Nebraska Constitution’s prohibition against appropriating public funds to nonpublic schools.

When Linehan’s new direct funding of private school tuition scholarships passed this year, opponents again launched a petition effort to repeal it — but with less time and more obstacles than they had last year.

Royers noted that lawmakers waited until the last day of the session this year to pass the new private tuition funding bill. It then took days for Republican Gov. Jim Pillen to sign it into law and some 10 days for Evnen — also a Republican — to approve the language for a new petition effort.

They also had to start before most public schools were out for the summer, leaving teachers unable to help with signature collection early in the process. Most difficult, Royers said, was having to explain to people who had signed the repeal petition last year why they had to sign again if they wanted voters to have a say.

Linehan said she expects the fight over school choice “will probably end up in court,” but that the decision to file a lawsuit to stop the ballot measure would likely be up to the Nebraska Attorney General’s office.

Even then, if Support Our Schools succeeds in getting the repeal question on the ballot, Linehan said she expects that effort will fail if voters understand that it’s meant to help people — including foster children and military families — without the means to send their children to private school.

“I don’t think if Nebraskans understood the situation, if they will vote to take those scholarships away from those kids,” she said.