Frederick Melms on a School Choice Voucher Program Lawsuit

Frederica Freyberg:

Petitioners in a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s private school choice program await word from the state Supreme Court whether it will take their case. They want the court to end the program, arguing it violates the state constitution, saying the Legislature has created a cancer that’s killing public schools. Tonight, we hear both sides of this case, starting with a lawyer who filed the school choice lawsuit, Frederick Melms. He joins us from Minocqua. Thanks very much for being here.

Frederick Melms:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

So why are you asking the Supreme Court to take this as an original action rather than taking your lawsuit to circuit court first?

Frederick Melms:

Well, there are a number of reasons. The primary reason we’re taking our petition directly to the Supreme Court is efficiency. Ultimately, this case winds up there anyway. If we start in the circuit court, we win, we lose, we appeal to the appellate courts. We win, we lose, we appeal, the other side appeals, and we’re in the Supreme Court. So ultimately this just saves two and half to three years of litigation for everyone. A lot of what we are arguing has not been decided upon before by the Supreme Court. These are matters of first impression. So they are also — they’re the most appropriate court to be ruling on these — on our issues as well.

Frederica Freyberg:

How disappointed were you that the Evers administration joined Robin Vos in saying it should, in fact, not start in the high court?

Frederick Melms:

Umm, you know, we were certainly disappointed, but, you know, the Evers administration and Miss Blumenfeld have their own agenda that they need to fulfill.

Frederica Freyberg:

So your lawsuit says that school voucher programs were, “designed to destructively defund public schools.” But isn’t that true? Weren’t they designed and started in the early ’90s in Milwaukee to offer private school choice to low income students and their families?

Frederick Melms:

So the programs we have now outside of Milwaukee are significantly different than that Milwaukee program, and what they do is, for every student who takes a voucher outside of Milwaukee, the state deducts the entire value of that voucher, which is, for a high school student, almost $13,000, from their local school district state aid. And in a lot of these districts, the state, they’re only getting about $2,000 per student. So for every voucher (intelligible) so for every voucher student you lose to a voucher school, you’re losing, you know, six or seven students’ worth of state aid in many districts. And then you either have to make that up through the local tax levy or your students don’t have the resources they’re supposed to have. And this has been felt particularly hard in Racine, where something like one out of every three dollars of their local property taxes is used effectively just to backfill the money taken in state aid to fund the voucher program for Racine students. It’s close to $45 million that the Racine property taxpayers are being asked to put up to make up for the aid reduction from the voucher program.

Frederica Freyberg:

So, in fact, in the last school year, the private school choice program costs nearly 450 million state dollars. What would you say that is doing to the public school system?

Frederick Melms:

Well, that’s money being directly removed from the public schools. That’s money the public schools are supposed to have. The state options when they chose how to fund this program and they chose the one that was most destructive to the traditional public school districts, and it’s our contention that this was intentional and it was an intentional effort to defund and ultimately damage public education in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

You say the private voucher schools don’t have adequate oversight or educational standards, which their advocates dispute in their filings and other ways, but why would parents then choose these schools?

Frederick Melms:

So I mean, I think there’s some pretty solid marketing efforts on behalf of these schools to suggest that they are a better choice, and while they may be a better choice for some students, it’s certainly not the majority of students. I think if you look to the most recent testing data we saw across the state that voucher students scored significantly worse on average than public school students. So in most cases, these are not public schools — or these are not quality schools, and if you look back, you know, throughout the history of this program, something like 40% of them had closed their doors already. It’s only a 30-year-old program. We’re seeing a 40% failure rate and then they leave these kids stranded who then have to find a public school. This has not been a good program.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We need to leave it there. Mr. Melms, thanks very much, we’ll be watching this case as it progresses.

Frederick Melms:

Thank you.