Idaho’s leaders love to say they support public education. But when budgets are written and priorities are set, those words, through action, disappear.

This year’s legislative budget proposal asks public schools to absorb significant reductions, despite repeated assurances that K–12 funding would not be cut and despite Idaho ranking nearly at the bottom of the nation in educational funding. Idaho’s current budget squeeze is completely self-inflicted.

These cuts are the result of poor prior legislative policy choices that were made during years of population growth and budget surpluses, at a time when the state had the real opportunity to strengthen and further invest in public systems, but lawmakers instead chose to shift public dollars elsewhere.

What makes this budget proposal especially difficult to accept is the math that lines up with House Bill 93 (the private school tax-credit subsidy), which is now under review by the Idaho Supreme Court. While lawmakers ask public school children to absorb an estimated $55 million cut in their neighborhood schools, this budget leaves the $50 million allocated to the private-school program created last year fully intact. There is no reconsideration of that spending, even as its constitutionality is actively being debated in our highest court. This shows us a clear statement of priorities.

Those priorities have already been showing in classrooms. Idaho continues to face an estimated $80 million gap in special education funding alone. Meaning the state is not fully funding the need for services it is legally required to provide to our most vulnerable. Districts must still deliver those services no matter what, so they make up the difference by pulling from general education budgets -the same funds that pay for teachers, reading support, counselors, manageable class sizes, and the extracurriculars that are so valuable to our kids. When specialeducation is underfunded, it affects every student, not just students in special education.

Lawmakers have also planned for devastating cuts to the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance, one of the only statewide public programs that genuinely expands access for rural students.

Weakening IDLA while preserving a private-school subsidy further exposes the contradiction in how “choice” is being defined. A choice that exists only for families with the financial means does not facilitate choice at all. The term school choice is misleading rhetoric; it doesn’t mean your kid gets to go to the school you want, it means that the school can choose if your kid gets in.

Taken together, all these decisions reveal a pattern: increased pressure on public schools’ resources combined with reduced state investment, and a growing willingness to shift responsibility downward, to districts, to families, and to local communities in the form of increased property taxes, all while padding policies that disproportionately favor the top. This is not a debate between left and right, but is a question of up versus down. A question of whether those with authority use it to strengthen the institutions that belong to all of us and that serve everyone, or to protect ideological priorities that then translate into communities with fewer resources.

This is not the Idaho many of us were raised in. Idaho has historically valued strong communities, taken pride in our local schools, and has long held the belief that we take care of our own by investing together. Public schools have always been central to that thinking. Budget choices that cut from constitutionally required public education while preserving comparable spending outside that system represent a quiet but profound shift away from those values.

Public schools are not failing in Idaho. When we label them that way, we negatively impact our kids by dismissing the places and people our children love. This budget proposal asks Idahoans to accept a version of our state that no longer puts its children and communities first.

Monica Dickson is a lifelong Idahoan, a parent of two children in Idaho public schools, a public policy graduate student at the College of Idaho, and the state organizer of Public School Strong Idaho.