Arise’s David Stout breaks down the dangers of legislative proposals to expand the CHOOSE Act. This 2024 law will divert hundreds of millions of public dollars away from Alabama’s public schools and toward private schools and homeschooling in the coming years. David highlights why further increasing that amount would be bad for Alabama’s public school students and considers some better ways that lawmakers could use the funding to improve life across our state.

David also shares some good news: Legislation ensuring Medicaid presumptive eligibility for pregnant women with low incomes has passed the Legislature and now awaits the governor’s signature. Thank you to everyone who made their voices heard in supporting the health of Alabama mothers and families!

Hello, I’m David Stout, the legislative director for Alabama Arise, and I just want to briefly touch on a bad thing that’s happening in the Legislature. That’s continuing a bad policy, and it’s called the CHOOSE Act.

A lot of people don’t hear about this. They hear about it in positive terms, but what the CHOOSE Act does is divert literally hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools to pay for private vouchers for people who already have children in private school. What that means is less money in the rural areas for public schools, less money for schools with a lot of poverty issues, and less money for public schools in general.

This year, there’s an additional $35 million to $40 million being put into that effort to divert money from public schools to private schools.

I like to think about an analogy. Think if you were sitting and your children were going to a public pool. It was regulated, it had the right chemicals in it, lifeguards taking care. But I didn’t like that — I wanted my own pool in my backyard. So what I would do then, to compare it to the CHOOSE Act, is I would go and get public money to build a private pool in my backyard that was unregulated and only for the people I wanted — or no people at all, except my children.

It is bad public policy to spend public money on private enterprise in that fashion. The money could have gone to the RAISE Act, which has been introduced and would put more money into schools with poverty, more money into schools with children needing English learning abilities, and more schools even for gifted students.

So there’s different ways to spend money. It’s all about how the Legislature spends it. We could have spent it to reduce the tax on groceries. There are all sorts of ways, other than to divert public money to people who send their children to private school.

Now, that’s bad news. On the good news front, our bill that we fought so hard for — presumptive eligibility — did pass the Legislature and is in the governor’s hands to sign into law.

Hope you stay tuned in. Go to the Arise website and stay informed. Thank you.