Audrey Dutton, ProPublica

Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has shut down a program that helped tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other educational expenses.

The Republican leading the push to defund Idaho’s Empowering Parents grants said it had nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative group, a strong supporter of the private school tax credit, drew the connection directly.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation, on its website, proposed adding the $30 million that fueled Empowering Parents to the newly created tax credit, paying for an additional 6,000 private and homeschool students to join the 10,000 already expected to benefit from the program.

The new voucher-style tax credits have major differences from the grants lawmakers killed.

The tax credits are off-limits to public school students, while the grants went predominantly to this group. And there’s limited state oversight on how the private education tax credits will be used, while the grants to public school families were only allowed to be spent with state-approved educational vendors.

Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a Democrat who works in a low-income public elementary school in Boise, condemned the plan to kill the grants in a speech to legislative colleagues.

“I have to go back to the families that I serve, the parents that I love, the kids that I teach, and say, ‘You no longer can get that additional math tutoring that you need,’” she said, “that ‘the state is willing to support other programs for other groups of kids, but not you.’”

When states steer public funds to private schools, well-off families benefit more than those in lower income brackets, as ProPublica has reported in Arizona. The programs are pitched as enabling “school choice,” but in reality, research has found the money tends to benefit families that have already chosen private schools.

Idaho lawmakers passed such a program this year with the new tax credit, which some describe as a version of school “vouchers” that parents in other states spend on schools of their choosing.

The credit allows private and homeschool families to reduce their tax bills by $5,000 per child — $7,500 per student with disabilities — or get that much money from the state if they owe no taxes. Lower-income families have priority, and there’s no cap on how many credits each family can claim. The law says funds must go to traditional academic expenses like private school tuition or homeschool curricula and textbooks, plus a few other costs like transportation. But families don’t have to provide proof of how they spent the money unless they’re audited.

The Empowering Parents grant program that lawmakers repealed was open to students no matter where they learn, although state data shows at least 81% of the money went to public school students this academic year — more than 24,000 of them. It offered up to $1,000 per student, with lower-income families getting first dibs and a family limit of $3,000.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little created a similar program in 2020 called Strong Families, Strong Students with federal pandemic funds, to help families make the abrupt shift to remote learning. State lawmakers created the current program in 2022, also using one-time federal pandemic recovery money, and liked it so much they renewed it with ongoing state funding in 2023.

Charlene Bradley used the grant this school year to buy a laptop for her daughter, a fifth grader in Nampa School District. Before the purchase, Bradley’s daughter could use computers at school, but there was no way to do schoolwork at home, “besides my cell phone which we did have to use sometimes,” Bradley said in a Facebook message.

Debra Whiteley used it for home internet and a printer for her 12-year-old daughter, who attends public school in north-central Idaho. Whiteley’s daughter resisted doing projects that needed pictures or graphs. “Now when she has a project she can make a tri fold display that’s not all hand written and self drawn, which looking back on, I didn’t have a clue she may have been embarrassed about,” Whiteley said in a Facebook message.

Annie Coltrin used it to get “much needed” tutoring for her daughter, a sophomore in an agricultural community in southern Idaho. The grant paid for Coltrin’s daughter to receive math tutoring in person twice a week, which took her grade from a low D to a B+.

Such families were on the minds of education leaders like Jason Sevy when they advocated for preserving the Empowering Parents program this year.

Sevy, who chairs a rural public school district board in southwestern Idaho and is the Idaho School Boards Association’s president-elect, said families in his district used the Empowering Parents grants for backpacks and school supplies, or laptops they couldn’t afford otherwise.

“You’re looking at families with five kids that were only making $55,000 a year. Having that little extra money made a big difference,” Sevy said. “But it also closed that gap for these kids to feel like they were going to be able to keep up with everybody else.”

Few families in Sevy’s district will be able to use the state’s new tuition tax credits for private education, he said. A tiny residential school is the only private school operating in Sevy’s remote county. The next-closest options require a drive to the neighboring county, and Sevy worries those schools wouldn’t take English-language learners or children who need special education. (Unlike public schools, private schools can accept or reject students based on their own criteria.)

“This is the program that was able to help those groups of people, and they’re just letting it go away” to free up money for private schools, Sevy said.

The freshman legislator who sponsored the bill to end Empowering Parents is Sen. Camille Blaylock, a Republican from a small city west of Boise.

Blaylock’s stance is that the grants aren’t the proper role of government.

Speaking on the Senate floor in March, Blaylock highlighted the fact that the vast majority of the Empowering Parents money went to electronics — mostly computers, laptops and tablets.

“This program has drifted far from its original intent,” Blaylock said. “It’s turning into a technology slush fund, and if we choose to continue funding it, we are no longer empowering parents. We are creating entitlements.”

In an interview, Blaylock denied any desire to divert public school money to private education and said she was unaware the Idaho Freedom Foundation took that “unfortunate” position.

“The last thing I want is for this to be a ‘taking away from public schools to give to school choice,’ because that is not my intent at all,” Blaylock said.

She told the Senate’s education committee this year that her hope in ending the grants was to cut government spending by $30 million. But if the savings had to go somewhere, she’d want it to benefit other public school programs, especially in a year when lawmakers created the $50 million tax credit for private and homeschooling.

Regardless of how the $30 million in savings will be spent in the future, Blaylock’s assertion that the grants weren’t supposed to help families buy computers goes against what’s in the legislative record.

Lawmakers pitched Empowering Parents three years ago as a way to help lower-income students be on equal footing with their peers, with one legislator arguing that tablets and computers are such a part of education now that “without the ability of families to afford those devices, a student’s learning is substantially jeopardized.”

Republican Sen. Lori Den Hartog, opening debate on her bill to create Empowering Parents in 2022, said it was partly to address pandemic learning loss. “But,” she said, “it’s also a recognition of the ongoing needs that students in our state have, and that there is a potential different avenue to provide resources to those students.”

First in the list of eligible expenses Den Hartog spelled out: computer hardware, internet access, other technology. Then came textbooks, school materials, tutoring and everything else. (Den Hartog, who voted to repeal the program this year, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Killing the grants also went against the praise that Little, the state’s Republican governor, has showered on it. He has described the program as itself a form of “school choice,” touting how it helped low-income parents afford better education.

“The grants help families take charge of tools for their children’s education — things like computers and software, instructional materials and tutoring,” Little said in January 2023 when announcing his intent to make Empowering Parents permanent.

He called the grants “effective, popular and worthy of continued investment” because they “keep parents in the driver’s seat of their children’s education, as it should be.”

In the months before Idaho lawmakers voted to kill the program, Little again cited Empowering Parents as a success story, a way “to ensure Idaho families have the freedom and access to choose the best fit for their child’s unique education and learning needs.” He pointed out that the grants mainly went to public school students. He again touted it in his State of the State address in January, not as a temporary pandemic-era program but as “our popular” grant program “to support students’ education outside of the classroom.”

Nonetheless, the Idaho House and Senate both voted to kill the grant program by wide margins, and Little signed the bill on April 14.

Blaylock disagreed that the grant’s creators foresaw it would be used mostly for laptops and electronics. And, despite acknowledging state lawmakers decided to make it permanent, she disagrees that it was intended to be an ongoing program. She said public schools already get $36 million a year from the state to spend on technology, which they use to furnish computers students can take home, so families don’t need state money to buy more.

Little, in a letter explaining his decision to join lawmakers in killing the grants, said he was “proud of the positive outcomes” from the program. But, he wrote: “Now that the pandemic is squarely in the rearview mirror and students have long been back in school, I agree with the Legislature that this program served its purpose.”

When looking back at how Empowering Parents was created, Sevy, the local school board chair, suspects it was a soft attempt “to get the foot in the door” toward vouchers, not purely an effort to meet the needs of all students.

He remembers telling Den Hartog that the program was helping low-income families in his district. “She was super-excited to hear that,” Sevy said. “It’s like, OK! And here we are two years later, just getting rid of it.”

When the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, it greenlighted the kind of near-universal abortion restrictions that Idaho lawmakers had spent the previous two years crafting. Gov. Brad Little said the state should turn to helping women who might otherwise have terminated pregnancies.

“We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies,” said Little, a Republican who supports the abortion ban. About 1,700 to 2,000 people a year in Idaho had abortions before the court ruling. “Families, churches, charities, and local and state government must stand ready to lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning.”

But since the June 2022 decision, Idaho has failed to deliver — even as other conservative states with abortion bans took steps to enhance their safety nets for families during pregnancy and after birth.

Idaho legislators disbanded a state committee that investigated the root causes of maternal deaths, making it the only state in the nation with no such mortality review.

They allowed two bills to die that would have put Idaho on the same track as nearly every other state with abortion restrictions — including Florida, Kentucky and Texas — by extending postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months. Idaho’s Medicaid coverage ends two months after birth, the minimum under federal law.

They turned down $36 million in federal grants to support child care this summer, while other states with new abortion restrictions — Alabama, Louisiana and Missouri among them — made investments in early childhood education and day care. Idaho lawmakers at the time attributed the decision to a pending audit of a different batch of grants.

Democrats generally support these kinds of measures, but Idaho Republicans dominate the state capitol and therefore control which bills move forward.

Rep. Brent Crane, a longtime Republican leader who chairs the House State Affairs Committee, said GOP lawmakers last year had hoped to put forward bills to improve health care and support for kids and families after the Supreme Court struck down federal protections for abortion rights. They instead got bogged down in debate over exceptions to the abortion ban.

“Idaho has some work to do,” Crane said. “Be patient with us.”

The need is urgent, according to Emily Allen, policy associate for the nonprofit Idaho Voices for Children. The state, she said, needs health care funding and other support in place to adjust to life after the abortion ban.

“Things have changed,” Allen said. “We can either bury our head in the sand, or we can respond with good policy that is very family-centric.”

But Blaine Conzatti, president of the Idaho Family Policy Center and a leading anti-abortion lobbyist, is not bothered by the lack of government support. Pregnancies, births and child care are not the purview of the government, he said, but of families, communities, charities and, most of all, churches.

“The Bible is clear, and the history of Christendom broadly is clear, that it’s the church’s responsibility to meet the needs of the poor and to ensure that people have the services that they need to live flourishing lives,” Conzatti said.

No action set Idaho apart from other abortion-ban states more than when the Idaho Legislature allowed its Maternal Mortality Review Committee to die this year. The committee had been granted unique powers to review private health care and other records of women who died during or within a year after pregnancy and draw conclusions about the root causes of those deaths.

Its budget of $10,000 a year came only from federal funds, so keeping the committee going seemed pro forma. Every single state, New York and Texas alike, had put one in place. But in Idaho, a lobbyist for an ultraconservative political nonprofit stood up and spoke against it at a hearing.

Fred Birnbaum, legislative affairs director of Idaho Freedom Foundation, said studying the causes of Idaho’s roughly 10 to 15 preventable maternal deaths each year risked inviting a push for more government support to help keep people from dying. And government support was anathema to his group.

“You know the old saying, ‘All roads lead to Rome,’” said Birnbaum, who testified against the committee’s creation on similar grounds in 2019. “Well, all government-created committees lead to the call for more government spending.”

Birnbaum’s assessment was partly correct. Idaho’s maternal mortality committee had made recommendations that could increase public spending, such as extending Medicaid coverage postpartum, expanding access to naloxone to prevent death from opioid overdose and providing better housing and child care support. But of the 52 recommendations in the committee’s final report, most called for no new government spending.

The role of such committees has not been so controversial in other Republican-led states.

The Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, for example, has been around for about a decade and is now “part of the entire effort” to reduce tragic outcomes from pregnancy and birth, said Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations for the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The Texas committee’s findings in 2018 that patients had bled to death in childbirth helped push the state to adopt recommendations and protocols for hospitals to train their employees to measure blood loss and to educate people on what is abnormal bleeding. Birth-related hemorrhage deaths started to fall the following year, Van Deusen said.

He said the committee has generally had the support of Texas lawmakers, who voted last year to adopt one of its recommendations and extend postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months.

Advocates for the creation of Idaho’s committee in 2019 pointed out how other states had helped reduce maternal death rates: seat belt laws in Nevada; substance use disorder treatment in Michigan; urgent messages to doctors and hospitals in Florida.

Lucky Bourn, the longtime Republican coroner of Minidoka County and a member of the maternal mortality committee, said its demise means Idaho will have no window into maternal deaths in the wake of its abortion ban, because the committee’s final report used data from 2021.

“I was very disappointed in the Legislature when they did not continue the funding of it,” Bourn said. “The thought that comes to my mind is, ‘With the change in the abortion laws in the state of Idaho, do you think that might have a correlation in the rise of the mortality rate of the women who don’t want to be pregnant?’”

The number of maternal deaths since the abortion ban took effect has not yet been reported. The committee believed it would have had 10 maternal deaths to evaluate from 2022 if it had continued.

ProPublica identified at least two deaths during pregnancy and childbirth that the maternal mortality committee could have evaluated. One death was from complications during childbirth in 2022, according to the woman’s obituary. The other was a murder-suicide this year that claimed the life of the pregnant mother and her toddler, according to the sheriff in the rural North Idaho county where she lived.

Little’s staff told ProPublica that he will bring forward a proposal in 2024 “to continue the work of this important committee.”

Lawmakers are also poised to consider other proposals that have previously gone nowhere. Idaho House Majority Leader Megan Blanksma, a Republican from Elmore County, said she is working on bills that would improve prenatal and postpartum health care, resume the study of maternal deaths and “support young families.”

Blanksma also said she will revive legislation to extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum care to a full year, a concept she said she dropped last session because of the ballooning cost of Medicaid.

“We are working on a full package to introduce come January,” Blanksma told ProPublica.

Conzatti, the anti-abortion lobbyist, advocates a more hands-off approach from the state.

Idaho has at least 16 “pregnancy resource centers” spread across every region of the state. Many in Idaho are Christian-oriented organizations that offer counseling, referrals and some material support like diapers. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the centers’ goal back when Roe v. Wade was in effect was to persuade women to carry their pregnancies to term rather than have abortions.

Few Idaho centers offer medical care beyond pregnancy tests and “heartbeat” ultrasounds.

But those centers are where Conzatti said people who have unplanned pregnancies should now look to for help. They embody his vision of a world before legalized abortion and before Medicaid got involved in the lives of poor families.

Crane, the Republican House leader, wouldn’t rule out state-funded support for pregnancy centers if there’s political will for it among lawmakers.

“Every option is on the table,” he said.