As an administrator of a small private school, I view the trend toward acceptance of school vouchers with mixed feelings. Vouchers could help many parents provide their children with our specialized educational environment and a program not found in any other school. Vouchers could help increase our enrollment, expand our program, and fuel our drive to purchase a new school building.

However, our unique program is highly effective in part because we are a private school. With vouchers, parents and guardians presumably will be spending state collected tax revenue. Recently, in a conversation with State Senator Steve Stoll, I expressed my concern and the state senator agreed. If private schools accept public money in any form, they would inevitably submit to state scrutiny, endangering their autonomy, and potentially corrupting the program that parents wanted in the first place.

If the state can guarantee it will not interfere with private school programs, then I can be excited about school vouchers. But I would be hard pressed to find any government that could readily provide such a guarantee.