I think I know what My Old Man would have said

The Iowa Senate moved swiftly in its first week to advance a bill granting vouchers to families of private school students worth nearly $8,000 per head. It leaves me queasy for the speed and commitment of the Republican legislature and governor, and sets off alarm among others.

I’m the product of 16 years of Catholic education, first at St. Mary’s and then at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul. There was never any question with our parents where you would go to school — you could pick any college you want so long as it was St. Thomas.

I’m forever grateful. The good Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary taught me how to write. Father Whalen, the journalism don, put me on the path of writing well. Brother John would say the same thing about St. Mary’s and Notre Dame — in winter he is a walking billboard down Lake Avenue for the the Fighting Irish.

Those nuns also taught us that Samuel Gompers and Martin Luther King, Jr., were heroes, that the least among us must come first, and that we have a grave responsibility to nurture Creation. Republicans were not into funding that back in the day. They wouldn’t even let the Catholic farm kids ride on the bus as it zoomed past their RFD mailbox. Dad ran for the Iowa Legislature on that issue in 1960 and lost. Fair enough. He didn’t really want much to do with the Government School. He certainly would not want his tax dollars going to fund some other religion’s school, since he was fairly myopic about the One True Church. But you should pick up the Reformed kid or the Lutheran kid if she is standing by the side of the road, and you should feed her a hot lunch for a buck a week. That’s about all the church-state entanglement they would endure.

Dolores’s dad worked like a fool shelling corn so he could pay cash for his brood of nine to attend Catholic school in Algona, and then Catholic colleges.

Nobody was or is turned away from St. Mary’s or Garrigan because they were poor. If you want that education, they will find a way. They always have.

So this is not really about fairness. Gov. Reynolds would give the voucher to the insurance executive in West Des Moines so his daughter could transfer from Valley to Dowling. That $8,000 could have gone to a deserving student from Estherville for an Iowa Tuition Grant at Buena Vista.

The tuition grant is a voucher. But Buena Vista is not St. Mary’s. It is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, and that means that students are required to listen to the campus chaplain a couple times a year if they can’t figure out a way to skip out. At St. Thomas, the economics chairman was a Muslim. My human sexuality teacher who showed videos of different positions — it was the only A I got, mastering the topic at least in the abstract — was Jewish. We were required to take theology and philosophy. The logic prof advised us not to trust bishops. 

College is not the same game as elementary school, where St. Mary’s is appropriately about the business of religious formation. Buena Vista produces adults educated in sort of a Judeo-Christian ethical context. There’s a big difference. Drake University has no religious affiliation but is private, and daughter Clare graduated with a debt load that a clarinet major could afford. The state universities have always hated the tuition grant but never can explain why their athletic departments swallow up so much money, or where their foundation money goes. The practical fact is that Iowa colleges are necessary to the state (teacher training, accounting, nursing) in ways that K-12 private schools are not. The tuition grant does not prevent Iowa State University from turning the Scheman Building into an athletic department cocktail club, or from the state universities setting record enrollments such that you cannot graduate in four years.

Now, St. Mary’s kids can ride the bus. Families get a tax credit through the Msgr. Lafferty Fund. They play sports at the public school and can attend free classes at Iowa Central Community College. They get USDA breakfast and lunch subsidies. They get student teachers from Northern Iowa and support services from the Area Education Agency. We’ve come a long way, baby, and that’s far enough. Vouchers are a step too far for K-12. The eagerness and commitment by the Republican Party to pass it this year, when their power has seldom been so consolidated, tells me that some private school corporation bigger even than the Dubuque Archdiocese is behind this deal. I think Pat Cullen would smell the same thing through his cloud of cigarette smoke.

I once told mom I could not afford St. Thomas. “Get a job,” she said. John told me the same thing. Good on them, because here I am and proud of it. I got plenty of help, but never a voucher at St. Mary’s. Praise be to God.

Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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