Rep. Travis Couture pushes bill to help families escape failing schools
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Rep. Travis Couture pushes bill to help families escape failing schools
Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, has prefiled a bill to create scholarships via Education Savings Accounts aimed at helping low-income and special needs students and families stuck in underperforming schools.
Under House Bill 1140, the money would be distributed through a state-issued debit card that families must use to pay for educational needs such as tuition, fees, textbooks, tutoring, therapies, and more.
“Education Savings Accounts empower parents, not bureaucrats, to decide what is best for their kids. My bill gives families the freedom to choose the education that fits their child’s needs. It’s time to fund students, not systems,” said Couture. “Right now, the system is unfair to kids who get locked into a certain zip code where schools are failing. This portable funding prioritizes those students and those with special needs to ensure equal access to a good education regardless of zip code.”
Couture says the latest dismal data from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction shows barely 50% of Washington students are meeting English Language Arts standards while just under 40% are meeting math standards.
“Those numbers show we have so much work to do on education in Washington state,” added Couture. “This bill is one piece of that to prioritize those kids who most often get left behind when it comes to education.”
The 35th District lawmaker says that recent polling shows that nearly 75% of Americans support ESAs, while 80% of Washingtonians support the program.
“We’ve already seen a massive wave of disenrollment in our public schools, and we’re saying we want to make sure that parents who don’t have the means to send their kids to a private school or to home school them actually have the support they deserve to give their children a great education,” Couture said. “ESAs create a free market for education. “That competition leads to schools upping their game to attract students, which leads to better educational outcomes.”
Recent data supports this, showing that ESAs improve education not only for those families who use them but also for students in the public school system.
Under Couture’s proposal, ESAs could either be funded through direct appropriation by the Legislature or with a business and occupation tax credit allowing businesses to direct a portion of their B&O tax to ESAs.
“We also need to recognize that this is one of the biggest civil rights issues of our time, and other states have already figured this out,” continued Couture. “For us to ignore it would be a tragedy.”
