Who will benefit from a school choice program?

This is the third in a series of stories about private school choice leading up the 2025 legislative session. Click here to read previous stories.  

When Idaho lawmakers consider a policy change affecting public schools, a detailed spreadsheet is usually nearby.

When it comes to private schools, however, data is scanty. The state doesn’t regulate private schooling, so it doesn’t collect much information on private schools or their students. 

This information is in high demand as the Legislature is preparing to consider proposals that would send taxpayer funds to private school students to help them pay tuition and other expenses. 

What is private school choice? Click here for a guide on terms and ideas in the school choice movement.

There is some publicly available data on private schools, and it’s likely to shape debates about who would benefit from a private school choice program.

For instance, Idaho’s private schools are concentrated in urban areas, while there’s just one private school or none in more than half of the state’s counties. And most private schools are religious, teeing up likely debates over whether the state should fund religious institutions, and if so, how much oversight the state should have. 

How many private school students are in Idaho?

Data on private school enrollment is sporadic and collected through voluntary reporting or crowd-sourced information.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducts voluntary surveys of private schools — most recently during the 2021-22 school year — and websites like Private School Review curate data submitted by school administrators and private school parents. 

A private school choice program would likely be eligible to home-schoolers as well. The U.S. Census estimates about 6% of Idaho’s school-age children are home-schooled. Idaho Education News’ next story on private school choice will focus on this category of students.

The Idaho Department of Education also maintains a list of private schools. And earlier this year, Bas van Doorn, a researcher for the State Board of Education, published a brief overview of private school data relying on similar sources.

These sources offer more of a sketch than a clear picture of private school enrollment, which shows: 

• Idaho has between 117 and 155 primary and secondary private schools.
• These schools enroll between 16,843 and 22,271 students.  
• Private school enrollment increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• And today, private schoolers represent between 5% and 6% of school-age children.

By comparison, 313,160 attended public schools this fall. Idaho’s public school enrollment has increased every year of the last decade, except for one — 2020-21 — while growth has slowed over the last year, with several of the largest school districts seeing enrollment dips.

Leaders in the Boise and Nampa school districts have said aging populations and housing trends are causing their dropoffs, but transfers to private schools likely contributed as well. 

Nationally, private school enrollment has increased in recent years as public school enrollment has dipped. Education Week reported that the pandemic accelerated this pre-existing trend.

Forthcoming bill will target low-income families

Lawmakers could consider a full menu of devices that deliver subsidies for private education: vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), tax credits. And they could add restrictions, limiting eligibility based on income or disability, or open it up to anyone.

Rep. Wendy Horman last legislative session proposed a tax credit program, and she’s preparing to introduce a new version that targets low-income students. The Idaho Falls Republican previously pitched a refundable tax credit worth $5,000 — or $7,500 for special needs students — covering private school tuition and other non-public school expenses.

House Bill 447 made $40 million in tax credits universally accessible to non-public school students, reserved another $10 million for students from low-income families and capped spending at $50 million. Horman didn’t share many details on the new bill, including the total cost, but said it will be more focused on “low-income families who need options.” 

A $50 million private school choice program would be a fraction of what the state spends on public schools, which was about $2.7 billion last fiscal year. And Horman noted public school spending has doubled since a decade ago, after a series of investments that she supported. 

“There are still some students for whom the public system doesn’t work,” she said. “Most people are still going to choose the public system, and I will continue my work of supporting the public system, but this is a bill about helping kids who can’t afford other opportunities.”

But lawmakers could lift a spending cap or remove income restrictions in future legislative sessions. Horman, co-chair of the Legislature’s budget committee, acknowledged these are possibilities, but she pointed to polling that shows public support for a tax credit available to non-public school families.  

“It’s a matter of priorities,” she said. “Revenues are still looking strong for Idaho. … To me, it’s impossible to put a price tag on the value of a child being successful in getting an education that works best for them.”

Rod Gramer is the former CEO of Idaho Business for Education and one of the state’s most vocal opponents of private school tuition subsidies. After studying similar programs in other states, he estimates that a universal program in Idaho could cost up to $300 million, and universal eligibility is likely the goal of advocacy groups and lobbyists pushing for private school choice in Idaho. 

“They’ll just keep hammering until they get universal vouchers with no sideboards, no income limit,” he said.

Gramer pointed to Arizona, where lawmakers lifted all restrictions on ESAs in 2022. The universal program has been popular but costly amid a budget deficit spurred by tax cuts. EdNews reported last week that the state is spending $800 million on the ESAs, well beyond initial projections, and costs are expected to reach $912 million next year. Arizona has about three times as many school-age children as Idaho.

Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who signed the universal expansion into law, is scheduled to appear at a news conference next month at the Idaho Statehouse, where the Mountain States Policy Center is debuting a bill. 

Following Arizona’s lead would threaten Idaho’s budget, and ultimately its ability to fund public schools, Gramer argues. 

“This is just common sense. … Every state has just so much money to go around.”

Where are private schools located?

Most of Idaho’s private schools are concentrated in urban areas. Ada, Canyon and Kootenai are home to 65% of the state’s private school students compared to 56% of Idaho’s overall population, according to an EdNews analysis of Private School Review’s data.

Cole Valley Christian Schools is Idaho’s largest private school with about 1,400 students across campuses in Boise and Meridian. Enrollment has doubled the last four years, according to superintendent Allen Howlett. 

Howlett credits much of the rapid growth to new families moving in from out of state, while a minority have transferred from public schools in the area. School leaders are now raising donations for a new $110 million, consolidated campus that will add capacity for 400 students. BoiseDev and the Idaho Statesman first reported the plans. 

Meanwhile, Howlett is part of a coalition of private school leaders that’s urging state lawmakers to adopt a private school choice program. Howlett said he doesn’t know whether it would quickly fill the seats at the new campus, and full financing for construction is years away. 

But he believes the state aid would help his neediest families, and it would boost competition between private schools and public schools, leading to better performance across the board. 

“I am in favor of competition, period,” he said. “Everything that I see that is positive about our community, our society, competition is one of the things that drives excellence.”

Studies on whether tuition subsidies lead to better academic performance in private schools have produced mixed results, Education Week reported. But research suggests that a competitive education market improves public school students’ performance.

Meanwhile, 17 of Idaho’s 44 counties don’t have a private school and nine counties have just one. Plenty of rural students are home-schooled, and they’d have access to state funds for micro-schools, Horman noted.

“This would be a continued investment in students in Idaho, no matter where they’re learning, whether that’s Sandpoint or Boise.”

But critics argue that taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize private schools without having access to them. 

Quinn Perry, policy and government affairs director for the Idaho School Boards Association, noted that most recipients of these “entitlement programs” in other states already attended private schools. That’s been the case in Arizona as well as Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio, where lawmakers have recently enacted private school choice programs or expanded eligibility for existing ones. 

“Rural taxpayers are saying ‘We’re not going to foot the bill for kids in Boise to go to private school,’” Perry said. 

Additionally, rural communities face unique challenges when it comes to funding public schools, said an analysis by the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy. Compared to urban school districts with more robust tax bases, rural school districts have limited local resources to lean on and rely for heavily on state funding. In other words, if the state tightens spending on public schools in favor of private education, rural school districts will be the first to feel it. 

“While the negative financial consequences of voucher programs are felt statewide, rural communities are hit especially hard,” the analysis said. 

How many private schools are religious? 

Nearly two in three private schools in Idaho are religious, according to van Doorn’s analysis for the State Board. Most are Protestant while one in five are Roman Catholic. 

Religious school leaders say faith-based education is a draw for families but not everyone can afford it. Tammy Emerich, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Boise, in March urged state lawmakers to support the tax credit bill. The Diocese has 14 schools with nearly 4,000 students across the state, she said, and 10 of these schools qualify for federal services targeting low income families.

“The reality for families is that public school is not the perfect fit for every child,” Emerich told the House Revenue and Taxation Committee. “…Many of our parents are making huge financial sacrifices to send their children to a school that aligns with their values.”

But the prospect of sending public funds to religious schools has led to unease on both sides of the debate over private school choice. 

Opponents argue it entangles the government with religious institutions in violation of longstanding church-state barriers. Framers of the Idaho Constitution prohibited taxpayer funds from benefitting religious schools in two different sections of the 1890 document, Gramer noted. 

“They were very clear,” he said. 

Idaho wouldn’t be alone in financing religious education, however. A nationwide uptick in new tuition subsidy programs followed a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that said states giving money to private schools couldn’t exclude religious schools. 

An analysis by the Washington Post this summer found that between 82% and 98% of private school vouchers and ESA funds have gone to religious schools in Ohio, Indiana, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin. 

Some Christian school leaders, meanwhile, are wary of new regulations that could come with the public funds. Idaho’s religious schools have long enjoyed the freedom to teach, test and select students on their own terms, but private school choice proposals in the past have failed amid calls for more oversight and accountability.

Cole Valley Christian mostly follows the Idaho Department of Education’s content standards, Howlett said. But it diverges when the standards are “in contradiction to our biblical values.” The school also doesn’t admit students from families without at least one “Bible-believing Christian” parent. 

“Many of our school boards and parents would not support something that would jeopardize our autonomy,” Howlett said.

A handful of states require that private schools report testing results as part of their private school choice programs. A recently enacted tax credit scholarship in Arkansas, for instance, requires that schools receiving the money administer “a nationally recognized norm-referenced test.” 

HB 447 didn’t include a similar provision measuring academic progress, and Horman declined to say whether she added one to her new proposal. 

“I’m going to defer answering that question,” she said. “I will say that there is strong accountability in the bill for use of the money.”

Howlett said he wouldn’t oppose an assessment, as long as schools could choose the test, but anything that would “tell us what we have to teach and how we teach it” is a potential dealbreaker for Christian schools. Parents hold private school leaders accountable, he said. 

“If they don’t feel like we’re meeting the needs of their kids or meeting their expectations, they take their money and go.”