DeVos Directing Millions of CARES Act Funds For Public Schools To Private & Religious Ones

Betsy DeVos is directing millions of dollars of CARES Act funds intended for public schools and colleges to favored private & religious institutions.  When you vote Donald Trump out, DeVos goes with him. 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is using the $2 trillion coronavirus stabilization law to throw a lifeline to education sectors she has long championed, directing millions of federal dollars intended primarily for public schools and colleges to private and religious schools.

DeVos has used $180 million to encourage states to create “microgrants” that parents of elementary and secondary school students can use to pay for educational services, including private school tuition. She has directed school districts to share millions of dollars designated for low-income students with wealthy private schools.

And she has nearly depleted the 2.5 percent of higher education funding, about $350 million, set aside for struggling colleges to bolster small colleges — many of them private, religious or on the margins of higher education — regardless of need.

Again, to be clear, DeVos is funnelling CARES Act stimulus money to private and religious schools, rather than the public schools the money was intended for.

Congress has largely rejected DeVos’s proposals to create programs that resemble private school vouchers, and public education groups say DeVos is abusing discretion granted to her under the emergency legislation to achieve a long-held agenda.

On the Senate floor, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, accused Ms. DeVos of “exploiting congressional relief efforts.” He said she had been “using a portion of that funding not to help states or localities cope with the crisis, but to augment her push for voucherlike programs, a prior initiative that has nothing to do with Covid-19.”

House Democrats included language in a stimulus bill set for a vote on Friday that would limit Ms. DeVos’s ability to use about $58 billion in additional education relief for K-12 school districts for private schools.

Again, to be clear, DeVos is diverting taxpayer aid meant for low-income students and struggling colleges and sending it instead to wealthy private and religious schools.

....as elementary and secondary education groups lobby Congress for billions of additional dollars to lift students out of the educational crisis caused by the pandemic. In big cities, which serve the most vulnerable students, district leaders are projecting budget shortfalls of up to 25 percent because of collapsing tax revenues, said the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 76 of the nation’s large urban districts. Its member districts said they could be forced to lay off 275,000 teachers.

Pennsylvania’s education secretary, Pedro A. Rivera, protested to the department that under the guidance, 53 percent more money would flow “from most disadvantaged to more advantaged students” in urban districts like Philadelphia, while rural districts like Northeast Bradford would see a 932 percent increase.

In Montana, school officials estimate that compliance would shift more than $1.5 million to private and home schools, up from about $206,469 that the schools are due under current law. In Louisiana, private schools would receive at least 267 percent more funding, and at least 77 percent of the relief allocation for Orleans Parish would be redirected.... The Newark Public Schools in New Jersey would lose $800,000 in federal relief funds to private schools....

Indiana has announced it would not enforce the guidance. In a memo, its superintendent of public instruction, Jennifer McCormick, a Republican, said the state “ensures that the funds are distributed according to congressional intent and a plain reading of the law.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/betsy-devos-coronavirus-religious-schools.html