Leininger to end San Antonio Voucher Program

We all know that a statewide voucher program is the beginning of improving our education system and teaching our next generation the necessary skills to succeed. Now is our time to take up the torch of the voucher issue and bring the issue to the people.

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San Antonio voucher program to end, but voucher debate will not


An article appeared in today's San Antonio Express-News. After 10 years, Children's Education Opportunity Foundation (CEOO) of San Antonio -- which has provided some scholarship money for parents to send their children to private schools -- will end with this school year.

CEO San Antonio is the sister program to Horizon, a voucher program for kids in the Edgewood Independent School District. Both are funded by San Antonio businessman James Leininger, arguably the state's biggest support of school vouchers.
Jessica Almanza has sent her daughter Jenna to St. Leo the Great Catholic School with a CEO voucher for the past five years. She said she'd find a way to keep her daughter there. "My first thought was, 'What are we supposed to do now?' This is our choice. Are we supposed to abandon our choice?" Almanza said. "I'm not saying public schools are bad, but this is what's right for my daughter."

Horizon, the better known of the two programs, was billed as a decadelong experiment to prove that vouchers not only will help students who use them to go to private schools, but also improve public schools by providing competition. It currently serves 1,703 Edgewood students and is scheduled to end this year.

But CEO, which serves almost 700 students, has been available for students all over San Antonio and pays up to $1,500 a year in tuition assistance — just under half of the cost of most Catholic schools' tuition on the South Side.

The program wasn't scheduled to end this year and it left parents, and Catholic school leaders, surprised. "We thought CEO was going to continue indefinitely," said Carol Johnson, principal of St. Leo's, where 43 of 186 students use CEO vouchers. "Parents have considered it a blessing that CEO was there for them. Otherwise a private-school education would be beyond their means."

Voucher critics speculate that shuttering CEO and Horizon might mean the end of the voucher debate in Texas. Leininger, who has spent $50 million funding the programs, long has lobbied for a publicly funded voucher program.

But Ken Hoagland, a spokesman for Leininger, said they're not giving up. They'll continue to lobby for a publicly funded voucher program at the grass-roots level as well as reach out to legislators that represent inner-city districts, Hoagland said. "Dr. Leininger's hope was that when state legislators saw the results of letting parents choose any school they wanted for their child that they would see this is a reasonable solution to the high drop-out rates in public school," Hoagland said, pointing out that more than 90 percent of students in the Horizon and CEO programs not only graduated from high school but went on to college.

Hoagland said Democrats in other states are beginning to warm to the idea of school choice — a broad spectrum that includes charter schools and voucher programs. He still hopes to convince lawmakers, Democratic and Republican, that vouchers are a good idea. "We're just going to keep trying and not make this a partisan issue," Hoagland said. "Really, his (Leininger's) passion is for the children not the politics…."

The article which appeared in the San Antonio Express-News is online here: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA021408.01A.ceovouchers.3805efb.html