After more than a decade of trying to launch some form of Education Savings Account/tax credit program for parent choice it looks like Idaho’s legislature is likely to pass legislation this year to get it done. Having been involved in many of these earlier attempts and gotten beat up along the way for supporting the effort, it is encouraging to see progress being made in the policy realm to expand learning choices and opportunities for Idaho families.
That challenge and likely success acknowledged, it may in fact be easier to pass a version of universal school choice in Idaho than it will be to create real new school seats and expanded learning opportunities here, especially for our rural and neediest students.
This observation is based on the experience of the last decade working to build public charter school seats in Idaho. In my role as the CEO of the education nonprofit Bluum, and as the Board Chair of the Idaho Public Charter School Network, I have worked with an amazing coalition of Idaho school leaders and innovators, community leaders, charter school board members, parents, philanthropists, lenders and elected officials across the state to expand the number of new charter school seats available to our families and their children.
Under our state’s public charter school law, which has been modified and improved dozens of times over the last quarter century to support quality new school creation (most recently last year), our charter school sector has built more new school seats than our 117 school districts have created combined over the last decade. From 2014-15 to 2024-25, Idaho’s charter school sector has built 15,618 new school seats while local school districts have built a combined 11,130 seats. Commensurately, during this time we’ve seen the percentage of Idaho’s children attending a public charter schools grow from around 7% of total student population served to 10% of students served.
These gains in public charter school seats have come at much effort and has required significant public and private investment. On the philanthropic side there has been more than $63 million invested in new charter school capacity – these are startup, expansion and replication grant dollars – since 2016. Most of this support has come from the generosity of the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, but there are other donors such as the Charter School Growth Fund, the New School Venture Fund and other generous Idahoans who want to improve education for our families and children. On the public side, Bluum has allocated about $22 million of competitive federal Charter School Program grants – these are also for startup, expansion and replication – with another $22 million to be distributed over the next four years.
On the facility construction side, the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation funded a revolving loan fund of $33.6 million that has been managed by the nonprofit facility financing group Building Hope. This program has resulted in $52 million in direct loans for new school construction. Building Hope uses this revolving loan fund to structure facility financing deals that leverage their philanthropic support to garner less costly charter school facility financing from private lenders and banks.
Over time inflation and higher interest rates have driven up the costs associated with building and financing public charter schools across the state. Yet, the need for new school seats hasn’t gone away. Idaho is still one of the few states in America adding students of K-12 age to its school enrollment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics enrollment projections through 2013 shows Idaho as having the most favorable outlook for any state in the country. Most importantly, on the whole, these have been high-quality new school seats.
In 2019 the Idaho Legislature created the public charter school facilities program, which allowed high performing public charter schools to refinance their facility costs under the state’s credit rating. This state support has been invaluable to eligible schools that refinance their shorter-term debt into 30 or 35-year bond deals. A key partner in this work has been led by the Idaho Housing and Finance Association that issues the nonprofit facility bonds for these deals. (To learn more visit here).
In 2023 Idaho’s Legislature went further and created a $50 million revolving loan fund for public charter schools based on the design, experience and success of the JKAF/Building Hope PRI model. The state of Idaho is now a partner in the facility financing of public charter schools through this revolving loan fund with the private and philanthropic sector.
This set of relationships across the private and public sectors has been central to the ability to grow new public charter school seats because charter schools do not have access to any local taxpayer support such as levies. Charters operate on only the state and federal funds that follow students to the school their parents chose for their education.
One key lesson learned from our public charter school story is that enabling legislation for new forms of school choice is just the first step in what will surely be a multi-step, multi-year, process to create new, innovative and hopefully better learning opportunities for Idaho’s children over time. Idahoans are innovators. We will see new forms of learning and education delivery emerge from the expected changes to law. These efforts should receive maximum operational flexibility, in exchange for public expectations of measurable results in achievement and performance over time.
This move towards new forms of educating our students will take money (beyond that initially provided by the state). It will take time to make happen. There will be mistakes made along the way. It will take persistent political support even when things don’t go well. Like with public charters, for these learning innovations to impact families and children at scale over time, there will need to be a permanent coalition of Idaho supporters and innovators that come together akin to the likes of what we’ve seen in the public charter school space.
