Lee's Summit Republican: My bill will handle transfer problem...and send some students to private schools

In his latest report, Rep. Mike Cierpiot, R-Lee's Summit, explains his legislation attempting to fix the student transfer issue. He doesn't mention the word voucher. Apparently, that has been changed to "passport scholarship."

This week, I filed HB 1822, which is my attempt to fix the current and pending problems with the state's transfer issue for failing school districts.

HB1822 establishes that the State Board will intervene with a district as soon as it is rated as a Provisional District. The intervention means it ‘shall’ intervene with individualized improvement measures based on the districts and community’s needs. The state will also assign every building in the provisional district an accreditation classification. It ‘may’ work with the district to develop interventions specific to those underperforming schools. It also ‘may’ transfer the underperforming buildings to the State Achievement District.
If progress to accreditation is not made to 70% within 5 years the district ‘shall’ be classified as unaccredited. At that time the state board ‘shall’ transfer the underperforming buildings to the Achievement District.

The State Achievement District will be a sub division of the state. 3 board members appointed by the governor and confirmed by the senate.(defined in 162.1110 of HB1822)

To qualify to transfer, a student must live in the district, attend the district schools for a least one semester and attend a school that is classified as underperforming. If a student chooses to participate in the transfer plan and qualifies as described above, the first choice is to attend an accredited school in their own district. Once there are no empty seats a student can attend a public school in an adjoining district or adjoining county (receiving district) within a reasonable bus ride.

These receiving districts ‘shall’ establish criteria for admission of nonresident pupils. These will include reasonable class size and teacher ratio. A receiving district shall NOT be required to employ additional teachers or construct new classrooms. No resident student shall be displaced from a school to which he or she would otherwise be assigned to accommodate a nonresident pupil.

Once all the empty seats within a reasonable bus ride are full, and only then, Passport Scholarships will become available. So if KC has 630 kids that qualify and has empty seats for 200 and if the receiving districts can accommodate 400, the remaining 30 kids would have access to the scholarships. This enables the receiving districts the ability to completely control the scholarships. My reason is this, if there are students are left over, what do we tell them? The scholarships will be funded by a $60 tax credit capped at $20million, this will provide $32 million. The scholarships will allow kids that don’t have an empty seat in a ‘good’ public school the ability to attend a private school. The scholarship plan will be ran by an educational assistance organization, a nonprofit. Section 3 has their rules. All private schools that accept scholarship students ‘shall’ test the scholarship students with nationally recognized norm-referenced testing.