By Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Let’s just say you think it’s a great idea to offer corporations a chance to divert some of the Florida taxes they owe to private schools in the state.
School choice, right?
It’s a chance to redirect corporate income taxes, insurance premium taxes, alcohol beverage excise taxes, direct pay sales and use taxes, or oil and gas severance taxes from the state’s coffers to a voucher program that offers poor kids tuition money for private schools, most of them religious based.
Maybe you agree with this insurance company assessment of the tax-diversion opportunity, with its generous dollar-for-dollar write-off feature:
“Participating corporations redirect funds they must already pay to the state, enabling them to help low-income children achieve greater educational excellence at no cost to the corporation,” reads the Westfield Insurance summary of the program. “As a result, the program is paving the way for an educated workforce that will greatly contribute to the betterment of our communities.”
Let’s just say you think that communities are actually better off when money is diverted from heavily-regulated public schools to virtually unregulated private schools that aren’t required to meet the public school requirements on standardized testing of students or qualification of teachers.
Let’s just say that smells like freedom to you. And you consider it a great accomplishment that private schools have flourished in the state because of the public money that has been turned into private-school tuition for more than 50,000 students.
And maybe you even think it’s nifty how Florida avoided any of those pesky church-state Constitutional issues by setting up a middle-man to launder all these would-be tax dollars into donations.
The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which was started in 2001, uses Step Up for Students, a Tampa-based charitable organization, to receive the corporate taxes and dole them out as yearly tuition grants for private schools, from kindergarten through high school.
And let’s just say it doesn’t bother you that the middle-man charity in this operation skims off 3 percent of the corporate tax/donation money for management fees, which amounted to $6.9 million last year, money that could have been spent in classrooms.
And let’s just say you don’t care that this daisy chain of money laundering has been made complete by private-education lobbying groups recycling millions of dollars in the form of campaign contributions back to the legislators who keep expanding the tax dollars available for this program at the expense of public education in Florida, which already has one of the lowest per-pupil spending rates in the country.
Let’s just say you think all of this is great.
Well, then you’re in for some good news, because this promises to be a banner year for the dismantling of public education in Florida.
While Gov. Rick Scott is in office, the Republican-led legislature is racing ahead with an expansion of the tax-credit program that drops the artifice of it being motivated by some overriding concern for poor people.
A new bill would make families who make 260 percent above the federal poverty level eligible for the private tuition money. That means a family of four that makes $62,000 would be eligible to receive grants to send their kids to private schools.
The bill also provides a yearly expansion of the corporate tax credits that can be used for the program. The cap of tax dollars converted to private grants would grow from $390 million next fiscal year to $873 million by 2018 — a far cry from the $47 million cap on tax credits when the program started.
The net result of all this diversion of tax dollars to private hands will take a toll on state revenues, creating a $32.2 million hole next year, and comparable shortfalls in the three following years, according to a legislative analysis of the bill.
This is bound to be bad news for the state’s poor, who, as always, will bear the brunt of the cuts.
Let’s just say that doesn’t bother you, either.
Expansion of tax-credit program for private schools will help everyone — except for those it’s supposed to help
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