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By RENITA FENNICK; Times Leader Staff Writer
Sunday, October 22, 1995 Page: 1B
As Gov. Tom Ridge fine-tunes the details of a revised school choice plan,
opponents and supporters of tuition vouchers are preparing for the second
round of their statewide lobbying campaign.
The heated debate is expected to erupt when Ridge unveils his revised plan.
That should be “within the next few weeks,” Sean Duffy, spokesman for the
state Department of Education, said Thursday.
In the thick of the controversy are families, teachers, school officials
and legislators in Luzerne County, which has a non-public school enrollment
that exceeds the state average.
The voucher plan, one provision of the freshman governor’s educational
reform package, was pulled from consideration after supporters came up seven
votes short of what was needed to pass it in the state House of
Representatives in June.
Ridge, a Republican from Erie, promotes the voucher system as the first
step to improving Pennsylvania’s educational system. His administration, led
by Education Secretary Eugene Hickok cq advocates issuing educational
opportunity grants, also known as vouchers, to parents who enroll their
children in non-public schools or in public schools outside their districts.
The concept is vehemently disliked by the Public Education Coalition to
Oppose Tuition Vouchers, made up of 40 state organizations and their combined
3.5 million members. Among the participating groups are the Pennsylvania State
Education Association, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, AFL-CIO,
the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and the American Civil Liberties
Union.
The anti-voucher coalition calls the plan “a tremendous Trojan horse” that
eventually will divert hundreds of millions of tax dollars from the public
school system into private schools, says Nancy Smith, coalition vice
chairwoman from Doylestown.
Though both sides predict victory when the issue comes up for a vote in
Harrisburg, Chris Freind cq , executive director of REACH, the Road to
Educational Achievement Through Choice, admits the burden is on the
pro-voucher side.
“We need 102 (representatives). I think we’re very close to having the
votes in both chambers,” said Freind, 25, who was hired by REACH on July 1.
Freind said a majority of the 203 House members must vote in favor of the
measure. “It’s not just a majority of those who vote,” he said.
Freind, son of Republican Stephen Freind, who served 16 years as a state
senator from Delaware County, has orchestrated a statewide petition drive
urging legislators to vote in favor of vouchers. So far, REACH has acquired
110,000 signatures, mostly through a cooperative effort with Catholic diocesan
coordinators.
Parochial interests
Among those who signed the pro-voucher legislative petition are 8,000
residents of the Diocese of Scranton, which encompasses Luzerne and Lackawanna
counties and surrounding areas. The diocese provides a parochial education to
17,000 students in 50 elementary schools and nine high schools.
Last year, two Catholic elementary schools — Holy Saviour cq in
Wilkes-Barre and St. Joseph’s in Plains Township — closed.
At the same time, Wyoming Valley’s largest Catholic high school, Bishop
Hoban in Wilkes-Barre, laid off five teachers because of declining enrollment,
said principal Frank Majikes.
Bishop Hoban, on South Pennsylvania Boulevard, can accommodate 1,200
students. This year’s enrollment is 592 for grades nine through 12, down from
the 1,150 students during its peak years in the late 1970s, Majikes said.
“I think vouchers will be crucial down the road,” Majikes said. “Cost
definitely impacts our enrollment. We do everything we can to make our school
affordable. If enrollment drops, it’s more difficult to keep tuition rates
from going up. We need to attract new students. Vouchers, I believe, would do
that.”
Majikes said parochial high schools lose potential students because of the
“big jump” in tuition from elementary to high school.
Tuition at diocesan elementary schools, for students in kindergarten
through eighth grade, ranges between $700 and $1,000 a year. The annual high
school tuition is between $2,200 and $2,800.
Judy Solomon of Wilkes-Barre already worries about being able to afford to
send her son, Ronny, a second-grade student at St. Aloysius School, to Bishop
Hoban.
Solomon, a Roman Catholic, and her husband, Theron, cq who is Jewish, pay
$182 per month in tuition to St. Aloysius for Ronny and Sara, a kindergartner.
They hope to continue their children’s Catholic education through high school
and believe vouchers would help.
Solomon, president of the St. Aloysius Home School Association, said the
concern is common among parents of parochial school students.
“I’ve been involved with school issues for three years and this is the main
concern at every meeting. They worry about getting tuition costs down, keeping
them down and how to afford a Catholic high school. We fear that when Ronny
leaves St. Al’s, we won’t be able to afford Bishop Hoban,” Solomon said.
Bob Washick, of Conyngham, opposes a state-funded tuition voucher program
even though he chooses to send his eighth-grade daughter, Lindsay, to MMI
Prep, a private school in Freeland. His youngest, Jessica, is a sixth-grade
student at Valley Elementary School in the Hazleton Area School District. Next
year he will enroll Jessica at MMI, where annual tuition is $6,200.
“That’s my choice. If I want my children to attend private school, then I
should pay for it,” said Washick, a special education teacher with the Luzerne
Intermediate Unit.
Concerned about cost
Smith, spokesperson for the anti-voucher group, says the biggest concern is
the cost. She estimates the plan will cost $250 million by the end of the
5-year pilot program.
Education department spokesman Duffy said the administration is “not
prepared to put a price tag on the program.
“We are changing some of the details, including income limits and what
parts of the state will be involved,” Duffy said. “The governor wants to
center his attention on places where people need it most. We also may offer
higher grants to the lower-income families.”
Duffy declined to release specifics of the plan, explaining details were
still being refined.
The geographic blueprints have not been determined and Duffy said it was
uncertain if Luzerne County would be included in the program.
Nineteen percent of the students in Luzerne County attend non-public
schools, ranking the area sixth among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. Of the
state’s 2.1 million students, 16 percent, or 336,093, attend non-public
schools.
State Department of Education statistics show 41,970, or 81 percent of the
county’s 51,835 students, attend public schools; the remaining 9,865 are
enrolled in non-public schools.
Of the county’s six-member delegation in the state House, only Rep. Tom
Stish, R-Hazleton, voted in favor of Ridge’s voucher plan in June.
Rep. Kevin Blaum, D-Wilkes-Barre, a former Bishop Hoban teacher, voted
against the vouchers. He said he has an “open mind” but suspects the mechanics
of the new plan will be the same as the last proposal.
“Without tuition controls, it’s not enough,” Blaum said. “By the time you
take out federal taxes, it really doesn’t give a choice to the people in my
district.”
Many of the parents who send their children to Bishop Hoban are Blaum’s
constituents. Many of them are involved in the REACH-sponsored petition drive.
“Our staff members, our parents, alumni are lobbying for this,” Majikes
said. “We’re constantly in touch with our legislators. Are they listening? I
don’t know.”
TIMES LEADER/RICHARD SABATURA
Casey Harvilla and Leigh Levandoski, both 6, and their first-grade
classmates at Regis Elementary School, Forty Fort, start their day with a
morning prayer. Their teacher, Linda Ancin, and other educators and parents
throughout the Scranton Diocese are involved in a petition drive to convince
state legislators to vote in favor of a tuition voucher plan proposed by the
Ridge administration.