A business owner and father of three told a packed courtroom today that he joined a lawsuit to stop Douglas County School District’s voucher program because it will harm his daughters’ schools.
“This is taking money from public schools and funding religious and private schools. This is going to cost our school district precious resources that we do not have,” Kevin Leung said. “I taught my children to do what’s right. It might cost me business in Douglas County and things like that, but it doesn’t matter. You have to do what’s right.”
Leung testified during the first of what is expected to be three days of hearings on a request to temporarily stop Douglas County from implementing the voucher program until a lawsuit challenging the legality of the program is resolved.
Two lawsuits were filed against the program, one by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other groups and another by a residents’ group called Taxpayers for Public Education. The suits have been combined.
The pilot Choice Scholarship Program, approved in March by the Douglas County School District board, should ultimately be struck down because it violates the state’s public school finance act, attorney Michael McCarthy said in his opening statement before Judge Michael A. Martinez.
Further, because so many of the schools participating in the program are religious in nature, the program “impermissibly entangles religion” into public school finance, he said.
The plaintiffs are also arguing that the program unfairly excludes children with special needs.
But arguing on behalf of the defendants, which include the school district and the state, James Lyons said the program is “religion neutral” because parents and students, not the school district, decide where to spend the voucher money.
Lyons said several of those families will testify that their children have already taken summer school courses and even participated in sports at the private schools, which they might have to leave if the injunction is granted.
Lyons argued that stopping the program now would harm not only those families, but other public-private partnerships around the state, such as the Colorado Opportunity Fund, which provides a college stipend to state residents. Students can apply that stipend at religious schools, Lyons said.
As designed, the pilot program provides parents about $4,575, to use toward tuition at any of the 21 private schools that have agreed to participate. In June, the school board approved formulation of a charter school that will administer the voucher program.
As attorneys fight it out in court, the school year hangs in the balance for hundreds of students whose parents have decided to participate in the program.
Robert Hammond, the state’s new education commissioner later testified that the counsel the state department of education provided to the district as it was formulating the voucher program was not unusual, as some voucher opponents have charged.
Offering “technical advice and support” to school districts is part of the department’s role, Hammond said.
“This is unusual because of what it represented. But if another district had something like this they were considering, we would do the same,” he said.
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
