This video is a bit dated, but still relevant: (6:38)

Kim Reynolds is wasting a good chunk of your money sending Iowa troops to the Texas-Mexico border to support Greg Abbott’s murderous razor wire in the Rio Grande. After the Fair ends we will see yet another of Reynolds really unpopular agenda. That will be funneling your money to religious private schools and taking that money in turn from public schools.

Reynolds and her cohorts will tell you that this is a matter of giving families a choice and a better education. That is in an old Iowa term hog shit. If Iowa’s schools were in such bad shape the state’s leaders thought the best choice was to abandon them then they are pretty poor leaders. Instead there should have been a movement to fix what they felt was wrong.

Of course what Reynold’s privatization of Iowa’s school system is to take public money and funnel it to private hands, much like her Medicaid scam. It is also in a very underhanded way a method to support a religion in opposition to what the first amendment says. That religion is Christianity. Since most of Iowa’s private schools are Christian guess where the money will go. Do you want to have the state support Christianity? I don’t.

Funneling tax money to religious schools totally obliterates the separation of church and state. Remember that ‘private’ schools do not have public school boards by a private Board of Directors, so if you don’t like the curriculum the school is teaching, good luck trying to give some input.

But of course one of the real driving forces behind the dismantling of the public school system is the desire by the extreme right wing party of Reynolds to cripple Teacher’s unions. Guess what private schools don’t have? Teachers’ Unions. Teachers also have lower pay, fewer benefits and little job security.

The amount of money that the state will take from the public school system is rather astounding. According to iowastartingline.com, almost $150 million will be taken from public schools and transferred to private schools. This will translate into bigger class sizes, fewer teachers, less maintenance and upkeep in the public schools.

The Iowa Department of Education has approved $142 million in taxpayer dollars to go towards K-12 private school tuition for the 2023-24 school, and nearly $100 million of that amount will go to applicants in just 15 Iowa counties.

New data from the department released Monday showed that 18,627 applications have been approved for Gov. Kim Reynolds’ new voucher program—called Students First Education Savings Accounts—and each applicant is slated to receive $7,635 in taxpayer funds toward a private school education.  

But Iowa Democrats were quick to point out that this is a very unpopular program:

Iowa House Democrats panned the latest news.

“Governor Reynolds gave the special interests and private schools a huge bonus today. It’s just the first installment of her promise to shift over $1 billion of our tax dollars from public schools to private schools instead,” said Rep. Sharon Steckman (D-Mason City).

“It’s bad news for over 90% of the Iowa kids in public schools who will have fewer opportunities and it’s even worse for those public school kids in rural areas,” Steckman added. ” Iowans are overwhelmingly opposed to vouchers because public money is for public schools, and Iowans do not want more of their public schools to close.”

The Des Moines Register also noted that 60% of the families getting a voucher are already in a private school. So for them it is Christmas  they just got $7,635 they didn’t have last year. {Sorry I do not have a citation for this as I do not currently have subscription to the DMR. The note is from the google description of the article}

Now more than ever Iowa’s public schools will be depending on bake sales and magazine sales. No wonder this is a really unpopular policy.

Remember next year when you vote – Republicans gave us two of the most unpopular policies in Iowa history: A near total ban on abortions in Iowa and school vouchers that will dismantle the public school system. Remember also that Republicans have been choking the public schools for a decade. Also don’t forget that at the time we needed leadership the most, during the covid crisis, Kim Reynolds and her cohorts essentially were only responding to Iowa’s wealthy.

Next year you can’t vote Reynolds out, but you sure can vote out extremist Republican legislators.