Remember? Even before the 2025 legislative session began, Republican representatives met to strategize the Rube Goldberg voucher machine that produced the Idaho Parental Choice Tax credit. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with closed-door meetings, pre-packaged model legislation, and a US Presidential Thumb on the scale endorsing the bill. And yet…Who could possibly have seen this coming? Analysis: This time around, Idaho’s budget problems begin close to home. Education-lovers, we’ll turn out in May and vote in the primaries, but let’s refine a mission and vision, too. And teeth.

When the consequences of Gov. Little’s budget holdbacks hit Idaho schools, will school districts, families, and/or individual students have legal standing to bring suit against the state of Idaho for the harm caused by those budget holdbacks? It’s a legitimate question. And even if nobody aims to go to court… all kinds of organizations, researchers, and education outcome analysts will need to work hard to measure the ways in which all Idahoans are impacted by budget holdbacks on top of changes coming with HB 93. We’ll need accurate, unbiased data. We should be able to know how and why students, families, and businesses benefit or suffer with cuts, holdbacks and changes to education. We should be able to track pretty exactly where the voucher money flows, and how and why it affects the state as a whole. What we’re bound to get is cherry-picked data collected by and for the ideological, anti-public education outfits like the Idaho Freedom Foundation or the Mountain States Policy. We know it’s coming, so let’s be ready with information that reflects reality, and a vision for excellent public education, for Idahoans’ well- informed choices. And fight, if necessary.

Being able to track money and data doesn’t mean we will, however. Perhaps some Idahoans will have standing to bring suit based merely on the fact that the state has decided to throw around lots of untrackable taxpayer money with no account–while at the same time not maintaining a balanced budget, as is mandated by our state constitution in Article VII. The convoluted process of pulling voucher dollars from taxes collected, or not collected (?), sure seems like a soft underbelly for some legal eagles who believe Article IX and Article VII can have teeth. Oooo….underbelly, eagles, teeth. If Gov. Little’s promises fall short, it’s our responsibility to recognize and remedy it.

And what about backing it way up and widening the lens for a historical legal perspective. What organizations, individual students, or families will have legal standing and be able to show harm done when our new Parental Choice Tax Credit laws spawn graduates from home or private schools whose diplomas have only vaguely been associated with academic standards? Given the fact that our governor and legislature have decided to interpret the Idaho Constitution’s Article IX, (The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools) in the same way a 1896 court in Louisiana settled Plessy v. Ferguson, will there be lawsuits in Idaho’s future that resurrect the fundamental inequity of separate, but equal?

Maybe we’re too post-Constitutional or even too post-republican-form-of-government at this point for many Idahoans to be thinking ahead this way. But if we’re honest, isn’t it crystal clear? No way, no how are vouchers going to provide what Article IX requires for Idaho’s students. No way, no how is HB 93 going to function as promised within its $50 million.

We who care about the Idaho Constitution and a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools, as well as a balanced budget, must not concede the argument that vouchers will offer better choice and better quality in education. Offshoots of the politically active and allied Save Our Schools, Reclaim Idaho, Idaho Education Association, and Idaho Charter School Association could start thinking beyond voter outreach. They could form some inspired research and legal teams that aim to spotlight the results of vouchers with valid data that families, voters and attorneys would use. It’s our responsibility to follow the voucher money, as best we can, and determine how to measure educational outcomes against established academic standards–and across demographics–as best we can, while we can.