Using your neighbor’s taxes to fund your child’s Private School Tuition

If you use your neighbor’s tax dollars to fund your child’s private school tuition and then claim its “your money” so you should be allowed to spend however you want to educate your child… that’s pure accountabaloney.

Public schools, like public parks, libraries and law enforcement, are “crowd sourced.” Everyone pays in (through taxes), whether they use the service or not, because “the public” (taxpayers) find value in having law enforcement, fire fighters, public libraries, parks and schools. This is how taxes fund public goods. And, yes, public schools, like first responders and libraries, are public goods.

Peter Greene, in a recent post called “Whose Money Follows The Child?” exposed the fallacies of the “Education Freedom”/pro-Voucher crowd’s insistence that tax funded, private school tuition vouchers simply allow families to take “their dollars” to the school they choose. 

“The suggestion that vouchers are simply a means of giving parents back their own money to spend on education as they see fit–that’s absurd. Our entire public education system is funded on the theory that everyone in the country benefits from sharing space with educated co-workers, neighbors, and pretty much everyone else we have to deal with. Everyone shares the cost. 

It’s odd that so much of the voucher crowd is also the “taxation is theft” crowd, because voucher funding requires the voucher holders to take tax dollars from their neighbors while stripping those neighbors of any say in the kind of education those dollars will be spent on. That includes spending my neighbor’s tax dollars on a school that would forbid, bar, eject, and demonize those neighbors and their children.”

https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2024/06/whose-money-follows-child.html?spref=tw

In other words, “Your money should follow my child.” And, also, why is anyone whose children are no longer in school paying school taxes at all?

Again, all taxpayers pay a little bit each year to educate their community’s children in a system of public schools. Just like they pay for first responders, parks and libraries. School taxes are not paid to educate your children, they are paid to educate ALL children.

You can use this formula to determine how many years you would need to pay property taxes to pay for your Florida child’s F-12 public education:

(number of children) x (13 years of K-12 public school) x (Total Funds per UFTE for your county)

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Total Ad Valorem Taxes you pay for schools

• K-12 Total Funds per Unweighted FTE (UFTE) Student by County in 2023 is found on page 3, column 6, of the 2023-2024 FEFP – CONFERENCE REPORT, MAY 2, 2023
• You can find the Ad Valorem Taxes you pay for schools on your tax bill. Add together all the items you paid for “schools” on your 2023 Property Tax Bill

For me, in a waterfront home in the Florida Keys, this calculation is

(2children x 13years x $12,078.91)/$2500.13 = 125.6 years

In other words, I would need to pay the school taxes on my home for over 125 years to fully reimburse the state/district for my two children’s public education. Or, if I wanted to take my tax dollars and spend it on private school for my own children each year, my “voucher” should be worth ($2500.13)/2 = $1250.07/child/year. This is amount I pay per child each year and it is nowhere near enough to pay for private school tuition and a fraction of what Florida’s publicly funded vouchers are worth today.

Like it or not, vouchers in Florida are paid for by everyone, from funding that could go to improve public schools. Like public schools, Florida’s private school vouchers are crowd sourced by the taxpayer as well, but they are not required to serve all children and have little to no local oversight regarding how those tax dollars are spent.

Of course, not everyone lives in a waterfront home in the Keys, so here are a few sample calculations from around the state.

For my friend in Tallahassee, the calculation is

(3children x 13years x $8,494.95)/$611.71 = 541.6 years

or $203.9/child/year

For my friend in Gainesville, the calculation is

(2children x 13 years x $8,424.87) / $391.05 = 560.1 years

or $195.5/child/year

For a multimillionaire acquaintance who lives in a mansion in Niceville (where the closest private high school charges $7,699/year tuition):

(2children x 13 years x $8,567.42)/ $4605.24 = 48 years

Still only $2302.62/child/year

In Florida, even those living in very expensive, highly taxed homes, need their neighbors to chip in to fund their child’s voucher (for the record, my multimillionaire Niceville acquaintance sent his children to Okaloosa Public Schools).

As Greene writes:

“”Just give us back our tax money, and I’ll get my kids the education I want and everyone else can get the kind of education they want,” is top-grade bullshit. The only people who it even sort of works for is the folks living in very expensive houses. For everyone else, the end result is some kind of lower tier cheap crappy school–or getting your neighbors to chip in.”

https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2024/06/whose-money-follows-child.html?spref=tw

The “taxation is theft” crowd is literally taking their neighbor’s tax dollars to fund their child’s private school tuition voucher instead of funding their local neighborhood public school.

As Greene suggests, why don’t we just “pool all our money and set up a system to take care of all the children?” I totally agree.