Allow parents to use school taxes toward private school. public school is a disaster and indoctrination fest. If they keep receiving free money from parents who don’t have students going to their schools, it will continue to be a disaster. You could also do this in phases. If you don’t have a student going to the district but to private school, start off with 50% tax reduction or allow 50% to go towards the private school. Homeschooling should also see a reduction or elimination. Or maybe some kind of tax credit that could be put toward a trade school.
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Great idea, though there is no escaping “indoctrination fest”, and district funding is an investment in the local community. What if taxes were assignable, meaning the taxpayer can choose how to allocate their taxes to the school. School boards would be responsible for publishing a list of categories, and corresponding financial goals, and each taxpayer decides where they want percentages of their school taxes allocated. This way, school boards would be somewhat accountable for the programs they intend to implement, and presumably those categories embodying “indoctrination” would net less. The categories could be general, ie: Salaries; Special Ed; Mathematics; After School Programs; Sports; Library; Transportation; Meals, etc. It would be up to the board to disclose, or not, what programs lie within, and the responsibility of the taxpayer to inquire. There could be a time period before funds are released to the school during which it would have opportunities to modify curricula to influence tax-payer allocation. And there could be a safety net in that a guaranteed minimum operational amount reaches each department so that your local school, which, for example, might be benefiting children who need a home away from home as much as an education, from closing in the span of a single tax season. As to public versus private, private schools charge the predetermined amount of tuition required to function, which is why they’re not tax-subsidized. They are, however, grant-eligible which gives them access to tax dollars. Your idea is a good one, and there are no doubt other ways of looking at it, including ideas to the contrary of what I’ve added here. It’s a good start on a very interesting subject–very grateful someone proposed this. Interested to see what others think about it.