Interesting. I’m looking at Iowa. If I can’t use an aggregator site, then it’s hard because a lot of schools don’t publish amounts on the internet. They might be trying to figure out what to do with Iowa’s voucher program. I got a few:
Scattergood Friends School, HS Day student:… $19,000
Des Moines Dowling (catholic) HS, Non Members: $12,800
Pella Christian HS: … $10,000
Waterloo Valley Lutheran, all grades: $8,600
Des Moines Christian, HS: … $11,600
Since the Iowa voucher program is $7,600, I assumed it was targeted at “reasonably priced Christian” schools. That’s enough to make almost all schools “affordable”. Scattergood is the outlier, it strikes me as a traditional high end private school rather than a Christian school.
I am pleasantly surprised that the voucher bill failed in the GA House given the big push by GOP leadership.
That doesn’t mean efforts shouldn’t be made in struggling schools. They absolutely should, but giving welfare to wealthy families wasn’t going to help the vast majority of kids in those schools.
I am now aware of a single instance of a school system truly throwing money at the problem.
Too early to see impacts on the kids, but this impact on hiring is a huge change:
In recent years, we generally would be lucky to have a single applicant for a position, fully qualified or otherwise. After announcing the salary schedule change, we had pools of qualified applicants to consider. It was a fun spring. Our administrators were having to have these rich conversations about best fit, really digging into things like, ‘Here’s a full table of highly qualified people; who is going to best fulfill the needs of our school? It’s a conversation that most districts don’t get to have right now.
The top end is still too low, but paying new teachers a decent wage and quickly moving them to a good wage is great.