In their legal defense of the country’s largest private school choice program, lawyers for scholarship parents take direct aim at the idea that Florida’s tax credit scholarships were designed to replace an unconstitutional voucher program.
The claim is at the center of the lawsuit filed last year by the statewide teachers union and other groups. They have repeatedly argued the tax credit program is a “successor” to the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which the state Supreme Court struck down in 2006.
In briefs filed Thursday with the First District Court of Appeal, lawyers argue the union has its history wrong:
When the Legislature enacted the Tax Credit Scholarship Program in early 2001, this Court had recently upheld the OSP against a constitutional challenge, concluding that the circuit court erroneously struck it down. … The Legislature expected that both programs would serve Florida’s schoolchildren; it did not intend the Tax Credit Scholarship Program to replace the OSP but to operate alongside it.
The tax credit scholarship program now serves nearly 77,079 low-income students, while the now-defunct voucher program was aimed at children who attended low-performing public schools (those students are still allowed to transfer to a different public school). Step Up For Students helps administer the tax credit scholarships, and also hosts this blog.
The parents have joined the legal fray alongside the state, which filed its own defense of the program Thursday.
Earlier this year, a Leon County circuit judge dismissed the lawsuit. Among other things, the court found the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case, because they could not show the program harms public schools.
In their appeal filed this summer, the union’s lawyers argued that the 59,000 students who used scholarships in the “resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced funding for the public schools.” The parents’ lawyers, however, note the Legislature raised funding for public schools by more than $1 billion that year, and per-student funding went up more than 6 percent. The scholarship program, they note, may actually have helped.
“To the extent that Florida’s most challenging students enroll in the Tax Credit Scholarship Program, they are educated at a lower cost and the Program increases the per-student funding in the public system for remaining students,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the state argue the appellate court should dismiss the case because it relies on “the same logical flaws that doomed the challenge to Arizona’s tax credit scholarship program” in a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court Case.
The parents and the state are now asking the appeals judges to hold a hearing on the case.
