At 8 a.m. on March 3, the Arkansas Department of Education opened up online applications for state-funded school vouchers for the 2025-26 school year. Created by Gov. Sarah Sanders’ 2023 LEARNS Act, the vouchers give families nearly $7,000 per student to put toward private school tuition or homeschool expenses. And as of last week, they’re newly available to all K-12 students statewide.
By early that Monday afternoon, the voucher application was drawing fire on social media over a multiple-choice question that asked parents why they were applying. Among the nine options provided was this one: “To access a different racial mix of students for my child.”
The uproar prompted what looks to have been a bit of a panic at the education department. By 2:11 p.m. that day, the “different racial mix” option had been scrubbed from the application.
The education department also deleted three possible answers to a series of other survey questions that touched on the sensitive subjects of race, religion and mandatory retention. In three separate questions, the application asked parents of kids who received a voucher in the current 2024-25 school year to identify their top three reasons for not using the funding, if applicable. Among the 13 dropdown answer options were the following: “Child did not want religious instruction,” “Child did not want to be held back a grade,” and “Child did not pass admissions test.”
In the roughly six hours the original response options were available, 110 applicants representing 129 students clicked to indicate that accessing “a different racial mix of students for my child” was among the top three reasons they wanted a school voucher.
No one who filled out the survey on the first day indicated their students qualified for a voucher in the current school year but declined to use it to avoid religious instruction or being held back a grade, or because the student didn’t pass an admission test to a private school.
The education department said there were 16,386 applications submitted that first day, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. (More than 30,000 applications had been completed as of 1 p.m. on March 13.)
A Monday scramble
Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the department reveal an internal scramble on March 3 to change some of the answer options on the questionnaire.
A fevered email exchange between Darrell Smith, assistant commissioner in charge of the education department’s Office of School Choice and Parental Empowerment, and Kalina Young of Facts Management, a vendor running the online applications, show that Smith reached out to Young at 1:16 p.m. that Monday. The subject line of his email was “URGENT – REMOVE drop-down option Immediately.”
“Kallina, I need the highlighted option removed from the application drop down immediately,” he wrote, attaching a screenshot of a post by public school advocate Veronica McClane on a Facebook page for Little Rock School District families and other stakeholders. In it, McClane highlights the answer option for parents aiming for “a different racial mix of students for my child” and asks for reactions.
People engaging with McClane’s post that day seemed both taken aback by the question and interested in the answers.
“I mean, we all know why they are doing it. I just didn’t think they would be quite so obvious about it,” Greg Henderson commented.
“The voucher program is a conservative attempt at resegregation, besides being a handout for wealthy Christian families,” one user commented.
Not all of the reactions were negative. Maybe the question simply aimed to find out how many Arkansas families are looking for schools with more diversity, some suggested.
“My child is Asian so I want him to be around a good mix of cultures, not just white, so I think the question could be looked at multiple ways,” Facebook user Shannon Fields wrote.
As social media users were weighing in, Smith was working to revise the online survey. Ten minutes after Smith sent his urgent email, Young responded, asking if he was available for a phone call.
“Please call ASAP,” Smith fired back at 1:33 p.m.
No records that were provided to our FOIA request explain why the Arkansas Department of Education removed the answer options about religious instruction, being held back or failing an admissions test.
But at 2:11 p.m., Young emailed Smith a confirmation that the four answer options had been scrubbed from the survey.
You can read the full email exchange here and here.
Questioning the questions
Not everyone who filled out voucher applications on that first day were asked the same set of questions. The survey is of the choose-your-own-adventure type, where the questions being asked vary depending on previous answers.
When asked how the questions for the survey were chosen, education department spokesperson Kimberly Mundell referred us to the Office for Education Policy, a research shop at the University of Arkansas – Fayetteville that often works closely with the state.
“In an effort to obtain data on the EFA program, the University of Arkansas’ Office for Education Policy included a series of optional survey questions in the EFA application,” Mundell wrote in an emailed response. (“EFA” means “education freedom accounts,” the state’s official name for the voucher program.) “OEP included the optional question and response referenced in your email, though it was quickly removed at the request of ADE [the Arkansas Department of Education]. For questions regarding why OEP wanted that question included, you should contact them.”
When we reached out to Professor Patrick Wolf at the Office for Education Policy, however, he pointed back to Mundell.
“The survey is part of the ADE application form for the program. Thus, ADE ultimately decides what is and is not included,” Wolf said by email.
A much-cited researcher on “school choice” options including charter schools, vouchers and other alternatives to traditional public education, Wolf offered a bit more background on the methodology behind the questions he submitted to the Arkansas Department of Education.
Asking parents why they are seeking vouchers is standard practice, and the answer options provided on the Arkansas application match surveys in other parts of the country, he said. Even the one about race.
“The question you refer to, and the answer categories provided, came from a federal government survey used to study the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. Both the question and the answer options commonly appear in surveys used for these kinds of studies. The question simply asks parents what considerations entered into their school choice decision,” Wolf wrote.
It makes sense. Despite the naked racism it might reveal, don’t we all want to know how many Arkansas families are using state-funded vouchers to intentionally self-segregate? This seems like good data to have!
It’s possible such data would become fodder for opponents of the program. . Clearly, not every parent seeking a voucher is motivated by race. But the idea of vouchers (and many private schools themselves) were born out of the wish of white parents to keep their children in segregated classrooms after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, after all. And research suggests vouchers still feed segregation in 2025.
Universal voucher programs like Arkansas’s are still in the experimental phase. Parents, educators, politicians and researchers on both sides of the debate are hungry for any data about who’s using them and why.
And hard numbers on Arkansas’s voucher experiment have so far been hard to come by. When it comes to public schools, the education department publishes information about the racial and socioeconomic makeup of their student bodies, along with numbers on academic performance and other key metrics. Yet private schools do not have to report any of that information, and we know almost nothing about the demographics of students in the taxpayer-funded program.
The vouchers were available to only limited groups of students for the first two years of the program. In its first year, the 2023-24 school year, 5,548 Arkansas students used vouchers. Participation increased to more than 14,000 in the current school year.
The state education department has provided only limited data on the voucher program, but we know the vast majority of participating students in the first two years of the program — more than four out of five — were never in the public school system to begin with. Most were existing private school or homeschool students or new kindergartners.
Eligibility for the program in its first two years was limited to groups such as students with disabilities, those entering kindergarten, children of military personnel and kids who previously attended an unusually low-ranking public school.
The 2025-26 school year will be the first in which all Arkansas students are eligible to apply.
The price tag for a voucher is tied to the state’s per-student funding amount for public schools. It has risen from $6,672 in the first year of the program to $6,864 in the upcoming school year (though certain students with disabilities can get more). In the current school year — Year 2 of the program — vouchers will cost the state more than $95 million.
State lawmakers haven’t finalized budget numbers yet for the coming year, but the governor’s budget plan calls for putting $187.7 million toward voucher expenses, with another $90 million in reserve.
But even $280 million may not be enough to cover everyone who wants a voucher. Should money run out, priority will go to students who are already receiving vouchers, who have special needs, who live in a zone with public schools graded D or F, whose parents are first responders or in the military, and who are first-time kindergarteners.
