State approves 17 school vouchers in Cherokee County

The Iowa Department of Education approved 169 applications to pay for private school and related expenses in Buena Vista and Cherokee counties.Over 18,600 students were approved by the DE to have educational savings accounts that hold around $7,600 each. The program, the signature piece of legislation from the Republican-dominated Iowa Legislature last session, diverts the state’s per-pupil funding from public schools to students attending private schools.

Buena Vista ranked 30th among the number of approved ESA recipients in its borders, just below Des Moines County’s 157 approved applicants. Cherokee only received 17 approved applications, ranking 69th among the state’s 99 counties in terms of approved applications. The state’s most populous areas garnered the highest number of approved applications. Polk, Linn and Scott received the highest amount of applications. Three of the state’s sparsely populated counties — Ringgold, Decatur and Louisa — didn’t register a single approved application.

The effect to area school districts’ enrollment isn’t clear. Patty Lansink, superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Diocese of Sioux City, said there are “steps and touchpoints” parents and the diocese need to finish before an enrollment estimate can be reached. For one, parents need to finish an online portal through the ESA administrator, Odyssey, Lansink explained. The school must then submit tuition figures to the parents, who must later accept the amount.

“We may not know how many students actually show up until well after school has started,” Lansink wrote via email on Tuesday. Fr. Brent Lingle, president and pastor of St. Mary’s Parish in Storm Lake, told parishioners via email last month that the church has spent “a lot of time and energy on Educational Savings Accounts for our families who desire a Catholic education.”

The effort, Lingle added, was “successful,” and the diocese will add “several new families into our school.” “There a lot of positive things happening to help our parish and school grow,” Lingle’s email reads. “Keep praying for success so that we can continue to live out our faith.”

In February 2022, Lingle told The Storm Lake Times Pilot weekend collections decreased 8% from 2016 to 2021. Its operating expenses have increased 9.5% over that timeframe. The parish’s expenses have only increased since then. He asked parishioners to consider an increase in their giving, as the district had trouble affording the $900,000 annual expense of supporting its K-12 school.

The passage of ESA’s last session was expected to be a boon for small private schools like St. Mary’s. Lansink and Lingle declined to estimate how many students at St. Mary’s would receive ESA’s. (St. Mary’s is the only private school in Buena Vista County.) In January, Lingle told The Times pilot he was looking forward to “welcoming families who are looking for a faith-based Catholic education for their children.” Storm Lake Supt. Stacey Cole said superintendents haven’t been able to estimate the effect of ESA’s on public school enrollment in the area. In Buena Vista and surrounding counties, there were 752 approved  ESA applications, the majority of which were in Buena Vista, Clay and O’Brien. “This is the only piece that has been released,” said Cole on Tuesday, referring to the Department of Education’s release of county-level ESA applications. “We had registration on Monday so now we begin the process of calling the hundreds of kids we haven’t seen yet. It’s quite a process to get done, but that’s not new.”