‘Vouchers’ are focus of District 30 discussion

Seventeen school board members, teachers, librarians, superintendents, business managers, principals and parents gathered at the Hill City High School Board Room Dec. 18 for the District 30 Legislators Discussion on Education meeting hosted by the Hill City School District (HCSD) Board of Education.
Primarily, those in attendance were from the HCSD and the Custer School District (CSD). A representative from Edgemont attended as well.
To start the meeting, HCSD superintendent Blake Gardner invited District 30 Rep. Trish Ladner and Rep.-elect Tim Goodwin to introduce themselves and share their outlooks for the upcoming session.
Entering her third session, Ladner said Governor Kristi Noem’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget is tight so the representatives will have to set priorities.
“I’m looking forward to the session. We got a lot of new people. The ones I’ve met are very passionate about coming to Pierre and fixing everything, which is idealistic, but it’s the heart you should have going in,” said Ladner.
Ladner is on the committees for Agriculture and Natural Resources as well as Local Government this year and said, “I’m going to fight for Custer State Park and the things that matter to the Black Hills, and the ranchers, and the farmers and our local people. So I’m optimistic about this year, and I’m very excited about it.”
Entering his seventh year in the legislature, Goodwin will be on the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, the Transportation Committee and is chairman of the Military and Veterans Affairs Committee.
Goodwin also said legislators were not going to come after education in their efforts toward property tax reform, but there were some big education challenges.
“It seems like all the legislators are home-school people. Have you ever put that together? Percentage-wise, it’s off the charts. I mean, I’m not against home-school people. I believe in freedom. I believe in the Constitution. If you want to home-school your kids, God bless you, but I’m not in favor of closing the public schools. We’re not doing it at that expense. So we’ve got to have a balance. I think we have a balance right now as long as we don’t go backwards on it,” said Goodwin.
Regarding Noem’s budget address, Goodwin said, “Everything she said was a suggestion. The only way that suggestion becomes law or becomes reality is if a majority of the legislators in the House to the Senate vote for it. So we have a say in that.”
Goodwin said Noem’s pending resignation makes it more complicated since she was selected by President-elect Donald Trump to be Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Cabinet positions cannot be filled until after Trump is sworn in Jan. 20, and the legislative session starts Jan. 14.
According to one of Sen. John Thune’s representatives, Goodwin said Noem is expected to take her new position Jan. 31, and Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden will take her place as governor of South Dakota.
“He’s not planning on changing anything. He’s not changing the Secretary of Education or anything like that. He’s going to keep the same cabinet. So I think it’ll be a steady hand. Those two worked good together so I don’t see any obstacles there,” said Goodwin.
Along with the expected transition in the role of governor, Goodwin said the last election saw the biggest turnover ever. Out of 105 legislators, there are 42 new ones. There are 28 in the House and 14 in the Senate.
One item of particular interest from Noem’s budget address was the Education Savings Accounts (ESA).
According to the South Dakota State Budget Topic Brief, “Governor Noem’s recommended budget invests $4 million in ongoing funding to establish ESA. The funding will initially provide approximately $3,000 per student for families who meet eligibility requirements and wish to enroll their children in private schools or meet their education needs through alternative instruction. Allocation of the dollars would be determined by parents within guidelines set in legislation and overseen by the South Dakota Department of Education.”
Parents would determine how the funds are used to meet the needs of their children by paying for tuition at a non-public school of their choosing or purchasing curriculum and classroom equipment for alternative education.
The program rationale listed is, “ESA empower families and drive competition, a hallmark of American free markets. For the first time, many families in South Dakota will be firmly in the driver’s seat making day-to-day educational decisions for their children. This will allow all educational opportunities to improve.”
Goodwin said he did not know if this would pass. He was not in any way for it but said there are a lot of people in key positions in the House who are in favor of it.
CSD superintendent of Schools Mark Naugle referred to the ESA as “vouchers” and said it would be in the Department of Education’s budget as a line item that the legislators would not be able to vote on.
Ladner said it will go to appropriations, and that committee will review every line item in the budget. If they throw it out, it will never come to the floor.
“So we need to market the people in appropriations and let them know our disapproval of it or our approval of it, but we need to get a voice going,” said Ladner. “These items don’t go to committee for a vote and then to the floor for a vote. It’s the very last thing we do during session, and it comes in as a G Bill, and we either pass the whole thing or we don’t. It’s a little bit different dynamic. If we want to launch an effort against this thing, it’s going to have to be sooner rather than later.”
Gardner agreed and said, “I was told by a former appropriator that a lot of times something like that, they’ll go to the caucus and make sure everybody agrees. So if you were in our shoes and you were trying to strategize against a voucher bill, what would be your plan of action?”
Goodwin said they should get the session started, see what the lay of the land is and then they would let people know if support was needed.
Ladner said, “We will be talking about a caucus consensus the things we want to fight for. So if you wanted to send emails or calls to all the legislators saying, ‘You’re going to legislature. There’s a bill I’ve got a problem with. These are the reasons why we as educators or parents don’t want that to happen in our district.’”
Ladner said the reason the Custer State Park expansion did not happen was because legislators received so many emails. Ladner received over 1,500 emails herself.
“There’s a lot to be said for getting involved in a respectful way,” said Ladner.
Goodwin countered this saying, “When I get 500 emails on something, it does not make me sway. I might dig in the other way. So I don’t think that’s necessary to just overdo it with somebody. I think if we go there, we’ll tell you the lay of the land. If we need to have an email campaign or you guys come over and lobby or something, we’ll tell you that.”
Naugle asked Goodwin how they were supposed to know whether emailing legislators was effective or not.
Ladner said she reads all her emails, but they have to be short and concise because there are so many. She has spoken to legislators who were persuaded by emails and phone calls but said it could be 50/50 between those who are turned off and those who are persuaded.
Going back to the $4 million for ESA, Naugle said it was his understanding that $1 million of that amount was to develop infrastructure to give away the other $3 million. To Naugle, that meant the program would be in place for a long time, and this was the first step, which was concerning to him.
HCSD Board of Education president Eric Lind said one of the fears of the group was nobody thought it would really be $4 million a year forever. It would likely expand.
“At that point, it will cut into public school funding. I think the other thing that we have learned from our association of school boards is that these things are tremendously unpopular with voters. So the legislature should know that if something like this passes, my hope would be that it is referred, and it would be resoundingly killed like it has been everywhere else,” said Lind.
Ladner said, “I talked to the co-chair of appropriations for the House today, and he said one thing that’s certainly true is that it’s a really tough budget year. And he felt it makes anything like this very difficult to pass. So that gives me hope thinking it’ll be killed in appropriations.”
Although he hoped he was wrong, Naugle said he would anticipate additional voucher bills. Goodwin said Naugle was right, but if it were presented as a bill there would be six chances to do something. Every bill in South Dakota gets a hearing at a committee, spending bills need a two-thirds majority to pass on the floor, the Senate would have to pass it next, then the bill would again go to the floor before going to the governor and a veto can be overridden.
Ladner said when appropriations hear the Department of Education’s budget, people could come and testify.
HCSD Board of Education member Todd Grabow asked what the guardrails were for how the $4 million is spent. Ladner said there will be more details when session starts, but right now it was just on Noem’s “wish list” and several things that Noem wanted were not passed in the last four years.
Naugle said this would be a turning point for public education. In regards to private schools, Naugle spoke to the administrator at Rapid City Christian about special education programs and learned they do not have to take children based on their individualized plan if they choose.
“They just don’t play with the same rules that we do. They just don’t. There’s no other way to put it. And the home-school thing is the home-school thing. They’ve got zero accountability, and now we’re going to give them money,” said Naugle.
Naugle said home-school students do not have to register or take tests every year. Ladner said children are coming back after being homeschooled wanting to do a GED and are years behind. Additionally, she said the socialization part is huge so children learn how to get along with people who do not agree with them.
CSD Board of Education president Jeff Barnes said, “One of my concerns is, when they say that they’re going to give this money to the most needy, there’s a lot of families that the only meal their kids get is when they come to a public school. And now if they’re getting more, they’re going to say, ‘Hey, that’s a $3,000 paycheck if I just keep my kid home and say I’m gonna home-school them.’ That is a huge issue in my mind because I know of quite a few families in our district that would just jump on that.”
Ladner said to her there was no accountability, but accountability could be built in if people had to submit bills before receiving funds.
Naugle said private school is not an option in some areas which would make home-schooling the only option. He said, “This really has potential, if it goes on for a while, to really devastate some of those small schools.”
Gardner said South Dakota was not the first state to entertain vouchers, and about 75 percent of vouchers go to children who are already in private school or home-school.
“I know this started out as a $4 million expenditure, but our fear is that it will continue to grow. A rough estimation was that this would be about a $44 million program to truly do it right in the eyes of the voucher people. There’s 150,000 students in South Dakota, and 130,000 are public schooled,” said Gardner. “Ninety-five hundred are home-school and 10,500 are private school, and that’s ballpark. Those are Rapid City Journal numbers.”
Gardner used the analogy of a camel sticking its head under a tent saying, “You start down that road, it’s really hard to stop.”
In Louisiana, Gardner said the charted vouchers created a pandemic-style learning deficiency for those families.
CSD Librarian Doris Ann Mertz said, “I noticed that in the year when she’s proposing this $4 million for education, they’re cutting over a million from the state library.”
By doing this, Mertz said it would give up approximately $1.4 million from the federal government that pays for databases, electronic resources and inter-library loans for all South Dakotans. At schools, Mertz said they do not buy encyclopedia sets anymore because they have them online. If the library resources go away, the school will have to buy new sets every few years.
“We’re going to lose so much that helps all South Dakotans to put in a program that’s going to undermine our whole public school system,” said Mertz.
Ladner said with the $182 million proposed for the new men’s prison she did not understand why $1 million could not be put into the library.
Naugle said, “We have many, many, many wonderful home-school families in our CSD that are outstanding, but we have some that opt. If they’re upset at me, and the next day they home-school, probably not the right reason to home-school. Is that going to be a long-term impact to the workforce and our work readiness if we’re seeing kids that basically are not being educated?”
Ladner said, “They’re not going to be in the workforce. They’re going to be in the system.”
Naugle said he hoped not, but he did not think it was that far off.
Mertz agreed saying, “There are lots of good home-school families. When I worked at the public library, I got to work with the really good home-school families. They were using the inter-library loan and the databases, and coming to story time and doing summer reading. But now that I’m in a school library, I see the other side where I see kids after they’ve been homeschooled for a couple of years, and they’re still at the grade level as when they left school and their teachers have to figure out how to catch them up.”
Ladner asked how they would know without testing, saying this was the problem. Goodwin asked if there were statistics for how home-school students do on the ACTs. Gardner said there was no accountability for home-school families to report to the school system so they did not have that information. Goodwin said that would be good information to have, but everyone agreed that the numbers would be skewed.
Mertz asked what would happen if a family took $3,000 to home-school their child and then decided it was not worth it and sent them back to public school. Naugle said the public schools would have to take the students back by law, and Goodwin said they hopefully would never find out.
“Public ed is under attack, and this is one more thing that’s attacking us, and it’s one more step towards hurting what we do so passionately,” said Naugle. “We fight so hard as school superintendents because we care so much. It’s not ‘cause we want to be pains in the hind end. It’s because we care. I got 900 kids that I care a heck of a lot about, and we do whatever we can to support those. To do that, we’ve got to support the teachers so they can take care of our kids. It just seems like all we ever do is defend ourselves, and here’s another example.”
With all of the concerns and challenges though, Naugle said, “We’ve got great kids, and our kids are going to do good things and they’re going to take care of us when we need it. I truly believe that. I have no doubt in my mind that we’re just going to keep getting better as a nation because of the kids we have right now. They’re different than we were, but they’re still good.”
Goodwin said he left with a bad taste in his mouth after hearing about the $4 million in vouchers. He felt like Noem “threw education under the bus on that one.” Goodwin said the library funding cut was a “kick in the shins as well.”
“I don’t think it was right,” said Goodwin. “For all you guys do, and you do more above and beyond than people realize. You’re all like that. I went to public schools, and I never had a bad teacher. My kids all went to public schools. They never had one bad teacher. My grandkids are in public schools. They haven’t had one bad teacher. They’re all above a beyond. So it’s a really good system.”
Goodwin said he and Ladner were in it to fight, and there were a lot of people on their side. His gut feeling was the proposed $4 million for ESA would not pass.