Also contend $4,300-per-student program susceptible to ‘fly-by-night’ scams & parents taking money for other uses besides kids’ education
By Matt Harvey, WV News
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Opponents of a West Virginia voucher law that offers up to $4,300 in funding toward private schooling say it would open the door for “fly-by-night private school scams” and would leave poor, disabled and LGBTQ+ students “siloed” in insufficiently funded private schools.
That’s according to their filing in a state Supreme Court case that’s set for arguments next week on whether a permanent injunction of the voucher program should stand.
“As the circuit court correctly determined, the Voucher Law is unconstitutional on five separate and independent grounds,” wrote attorneys John H. Tinney Jr. of Hendrickson & Long PLLC in Charleston, Jessica Levin and Wendy Lecker of the Education Law Center in New Jersey, and Tamerlin J. Godley, Timothy D. Reynolds, Philip Hwang, Kiaura Clark, Zoe Lo and Benjamin S. Gilberg of Paul Hastings LLP of Los Angeles.
“The Voucher Law: (1) exceeds and frustrates the Legislature’s powers and duties under the Education Article of the Constitution; (2) impinges on a student’s fundamental right to an education without meeting strict scrutiny; (3) violates constitutional requirements that the public money raised and spent to meet a child’s fundamental right to an education “shall” be for the support of the free schools; (4) usurps the Board of Education’s constitutional authority over publicly funded K-12 education; and (5) treats similarly situated students differently, with some treated in a disadvantageous manner, rendering it an impermissible special law,” they wrote…
