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COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE
WORKFORCE October 27, 2005 Empowering Families & Schools: An Innovative Proposal for Hurricane Education Relief COSPONSOR THE FAMILY EDUCATION REIMBURSEMENT ACT
Dear Colleague:
We’d like to draw your attention to the attached article from today’s Wall Street Journal, which highlights the details of an innovative proposal to provide simplified, streamlined education relief for students displaced following the Gulf Coast hurricanes by providing reimbursement to the schools where they have enrolled. The Family Education Reimbursement Act (H.R. 4097), introduced last week, has garnered strong backing from those who support an efficient and effective strategy to target relief to the schools that have opened their doors to welcome displaced students.
This proposal is particularly meaningful for communities like ours, which have taken in a significant number of students in the wake of these storms. Our schools – public, private, and charter – all offered the same generosity by welcoming students and ensuring that in their time of need, educational opportunities would be available. These schools don’t need another layer of bureaucracy to navigate; they need a straightforward approach to receive reimbursement for the costs they have taken on.
Over the last several weeks, a growing consensus has emerged among both Republicans and Democrats who recognize that the unprecedented nature of the tragedy requires an unprecedented response. If we expect our response to meet the needs of all stakeholders – parents, students, schools, and taxpayers alike – we need solutions that bypass cumbersome bureaucracies and, instead, provide direct education aid on behalf of parents and families who need it most.
Schools across the nation have opened their doors and welcomed displaced students as their own. It’s time we offer a simple, straightforward process to reimburse these schools and ensure relief is available on behalf of all the students affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. For more information or to cosponsor the proposal, contact Lucy House with the Education & the Workforce Committee at x5-6558.
Sincerely,
Wall Street Journal October 27, 2005
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Education
End-Run
There's no shortage of bills in Congress to provide school aid for victims of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. But by far the best proposal out there is the Family Education Reimbursement Act, if for no other reason than its express goal is to circumvent the bureaucracies that make it so difficult to speed federal relief to displaced students and the schools that take them in.
The measure was introduced last week by House Education Committee Chairman John Boehner of Ohio and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, both Republicans, and its implementation couldn't be simpler. To create an account, parents could register on the Web, through a toll-free number or by signing up in person at a school. The accounts would provide up to $6,700 for each child, which is the average expenditure in states that have been enrolling the bulk of Katrina's 372,000 displaced students.
Next, parents would provide the account number to the school enrolling their child, and the school would use that information to get reimbursed. That's it. No endless paperwork for the families. No lengthy reimbursement procedure for the schools. Instead of forcing a school that has graciously opened its doors to refugees to make an extra funding request to the district, which in turn must go to the state, which in turn must go to the feds, the legislation provides a user-friendly alternative.
All schools would be eligible -- public, private, parochial or charters. And the accounts would be portable. The money would follow the child in case a displaced family decides to move back home or relocate somewhere else. And in a welcome nod to fiscal conscientiousness that has been all too rare in Congress, at the end of the school year any unused funds would go back to the Treasury. The program would be administered by an agency -- preferably a private one -- that could be up and running in as little as a month's time.
The problem with competing measures -- such as the Senate bill cosponsored by Republican Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Democrat Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts -- is that they filter federal relief through the existing education bureaucracy. We can't explain Mr. Enzi's behavior, but Mr. Kennedy's is predictable. His special-interest constituency is this very bureaucracy, nurtured by the teachers unions.
Mr. Kennedy says his bill doesn't discriminate against private or religious institutions, and technically it doesn't. But there are so many restrictions on how the funds can be used that the bill would likely dissuade all but a few from taking part. That of course undermines the original goal of providing education assistance to all the families displaced by Katrina, no matter where their children attend school.
We suspect that the opposition coming from Mr. Kennedy, National Education Association President Reg Weaver and others can also be explained by their fear that these education accounts would be a big success. The last thing they want to see is proof that there's an alternative to the education status quo. |