The Impact of Diverting Public Money to Private School Vouchers in Kentucky

Diverting public money to private schools in Kentucky, the inevitable outcome if Amendment 2 passes this fall, would deeply harm Kentucky’s public schools, siphoning vital dollars from the schools the vast majority of children will always attend and putting thousands of jobs at risk, according to a report from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

The report models the impact of Kentucky implementing a voucher program similar to those in other states. For Kentucky, establishing a program proportional to what Florida, the largest state voucher program, now has in place would cost $1.19 billion annually from the state budget. That equals the cost of employing 9,869 Kentucky public school teachers and employees.

Even a much smaller voucher program just one-sixth the proportional size of Florida’s and smaller than the rapidly growing programs in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, would cost Kentucky’s budget $199 million, equivalent to employing 1,645 public school personnel. 

Such a program would most negatively affect the state’s rural school districts, which depend disproportionately on state dollars and typically lack private schools. 

The report makes clear that if Amendment 2 passes, it will upend Kentucky’s longstanding constitutional commitment to public education and result in legislation that harms public schools across the commonwealth. The amendment will widen the growing divides that are already weakening Kentucky communities and hinder education’s role in fostering the healthy democracy necessary for every Kentuckian to thrive.

The recent experience of other states also shows that 65%-90% of voucher costs go to subsidize families already sending their children to private schools or planning to do so. Providing vouchers to the 58,000 kids now in private schools in Kentucky will cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the report shows.

Making matters worse, that money is very likely to come out of our already underfunded public schools, leaving them less able to deliver the vital services we depend on them for.

 The report also finds: 

• The average household income of families already sending their children to private schools in Kentucky, who are the likely primary beneficiaries of universal voucher legislation, is 54% higher than public school families.

• The cost of paying for vouchers will directly hit the state’s poorest rural areas the hardest because they are the most dependent on state dollars for public education due to low local property wealth. These districts also almost entirely lack private schools, with more than half of existing private schools located in only three urban Kentucky counties. The result will be tax dollars leaving these rural districts entirely, with local residents’ state taxes paying for private education elsewhere. 

• The cost of private school subsidies will also be high in the state’s more populous counties, where public schools are more likely to face a second budgetary impact of a shift in enrollment to private schools and privately controlled charter schools.

Read the full report: BTS Q3 2024_KCEP Report.png