Parent Choice Voucher Program Not Ready December 1st As Promised, Treat Frustrated

Without spending a lot of time re-hashing our stance on the Parental Choice voucher program – the state should NEVER, ever, ever, EVER, allow tax dollars to be used as tuition to a private school – no matter how hard you have to work to find the ‘right’ words to make it sound palatable to the plebes. More on this later this week.

Friday, December 1st, the Parental Choice voucher program was supposed to be open for enrollment. Next thing I know, there’s a communication in my inbox from Senate Pro Temp Greg Treat:

Interesting. KOSU reports that the vendor MERIT is to blame for the delay.

KOKH reports that MERIT is a vendor for the voucher picked by the Oklahoma Tax Commission from a list supplied by OHMES. It wasn’t a competitively bid job. The job of collecting applications wasn’t done inside the OTC, it was farmed to an out-of-state vendor. (Remember when that happened with Federal educational funds dispersed to Oklahoma during COVID? If you’re not sure, look here and here.) All that local Oklahoma student data – to an out-of-state vendor that uses a data warehouse called SNOWFLAKE that functions in the cloud. All one needs to do is look at this page on the Merit site where you see the term “digital wallet” and there’s no way a parent SHOULDN’T wonder where the data associated with their family’s application will go.

Julianne Romanello has done a very large amount of research on Merit and the tax credit/voucher and has found that this whole scheme – vouchering private schools under the government umbrella while collecting huge amounts of data on students – is just another way to connect students to the global education workforce pipeline. She’ll be the first guest on the FIRST ROPE Report after the holidays (Wednesday, January 10th – so mark your calendars NOW!) BEFORE our legislature goes into session, to talk about this. In the meantime, please find our video about all the data collection pathways and the State Longitudinal Data Base on YouTube. Parents, it’s time to OPT OUT of these systems of tracking your children. That’s all I’ll say for now.

In addition, it’s important to note that the tax credit/voucher program started out in the hole. The deal struck with MERIT was for nearly 4 million dollars, yet the legislature had only appropriated one million dollars for set up. Imagine that, the government over-budget on something. But then, imagine the government actually doing the job the legislature intended them to do.

So, Jenni, you gripe and moan but offer no solutions. Well, not exactly. For years our mantra has been, “don’t tax us for failing schools” or alternatively “don’t tax us for public education we don’t use”. So, instead of providing a blanket voucher to people to take government tax dollars to a private school where they’ll then be subject to government regulation, just let us keep our money – period. Don’t take it, make it government property and then return it to me with strings (or to a private organization or individual with strings), just let me keep my own money. If you want to argue that these dollars are not tax dollars, that they’re yours, you’re just getting them back, watch these two short videos culled from interviews we’ve had on the ROPE Report.

Also, please take the time to watch my video on the Oklahoma parental tax credit. You might be surprised what you learn.