Austin Gelder and Elizabeth L. Cline, writing for Arkansas Times, gave many parents navigating the new state universal taxpayer-funded vouchers a chance to weigh in.
The vouchers are open to any and all Arkansas K-12 students for the first time this school year, meaning every parent or guardian of a school-aged child potentially has a choice to make. And every Arkansas taxpayer has money in the game. The state is expected to shell out an estimated $326 million for vouchers in 2025-26. That spending comes on top of funding for traditional public schools, which state government is constitutionally bound to maintain, even as it now directs public dollars and resources to nonpublic schools.
Now that the voucher issue has moved beyond the hands of politicians and into the hands of parents, we wanted to know what real people really thought. Who’s using these vouchers, and why? Who’s still out there singing the praises of their neighborhood schools and traditional public education? And what happens when family and friends find they’re on opposing sides of the debate?
Several parents are included in the article; here’s just one example.
I support the intent of the voucher program. It’s a wonderful idea in theory to give all children, regardless of income or learning differences, a chance at a better educational environment. But in practice, I think it’s excluding the very families these vouchers were meant to help.
We qualified for the voucher early in the spring of 2024 because my husband is a first responder. [Children of first responders were among the limited groups allowed to claim vouchers in the first two years of the program, before it opened up to all students in August 2025.] We’re a middle-class family. We’re small business owners, white, and by most measures doing fine, but we are not in the income bracket that can easily absorb full private school tuition.
We had planned to use the voucher to send our daughter to a private school because she is bright, but she also has dyslexia and ADHD. We were looking for a smaller class size and more one-on-one teaching to help her focus. Our hope was that the voucher would cover roughly half of the tuition, and that we would make up the rest.
We toured [a private school], but our admissions experience there was surprisingly disheartening. I own my own company and was coming directly from work, and I arrived wearing my uniform shirt with my business name on it. The administrator seemed to make assumptions about our financial situation based solely on what I was wearing.
She mentioned that “generous parents” had donated significant sums to the school, and then looked at my shirt and said, “You know, there are government vouchers available,” implying that we wouldn’t be able to pay tuition otherwise. I didn’t respond because, although the comment was incredibly distasteful, she wasn’t far off on her assessment. She also criticized us for supposedly not providing “everyday support” for my daughter’s dyslexia, despite the fact that my daughter has received consistent specialized outside tutoring and accommodations since she was 5. The overall tone was judgmental and dismissive.
Then, during my daughter’s shadow day at the school, she was left unsupervised to wander the halls. Shortly afterward, we received an email stating that she “would not be a good fit” at their school. So even with the voucher, we were not allowed to attend the school.
I also reached out to admissions at several other private schools and discovered that many schools have increased their tuition since the voucher program began.