Sean Dengler.

As I visited Clear Lake this weekend, I took a stroll through Ventura to my favorite ice cream shop. While seeing the sign for Ventura’s greatest basketball player, Lynne Lorenzen, who resided in Tama County for part of her youth before moving up to the Clear Lake area, the school district she played at is no more. After consolidating with Garner-Hayfield over ten years ago, the school district of Garner-Hayfield-Ventura closed the old Ventura building, which housed the middle school until 2020. This school district holds my interest due to my wife being a Ventura alum.

Consolidation of public schools is nothing new, unfortunately, due to lower enrollment and not enough money to pay the bills. It is always devastating when a school closes. When the school goes, it is harder for the town to hold on. Fortunately, the Ventura school building, which still has the words “Ventura Consolidated School” etched into its brick structure, was bought and now houses another school.

While not seeing another closed rural public school building go into disarray, something felt off. When public schools are making cuts by offering early retirement packages, not backfilling positions, the state not keeping up with the pace of inflation, and then seeing the preference of state policies towards using taxpayer money for private entities like the private school in the old Ventura school building does not align.

Private schools are great for those who see them as the correct fit. Public schools are not for everyone nor are private schools. Seeing a private school taking the place of a public school using taxpayer dollars is antithetical to the free market. Public education is meant to serve everyone. If someone sees private education as better than public education, go for it but not at the expense of those who need public education.

Public schools have been chronically underfunded for many years, causing schools which had served these communities for numerous years and the children and their families who depended on them. With the closure of these schools, the connectivity and history of the school gradually disappear. Lack of funding and economic policies which have led to less students in these communities cause this plight.

What used to be a school governed by community members, held to state standards, and accountable to their constituents, is replaced by a school which uses Education Savings Accounts to subsidize student tuition and help make the school stay afloat while not abiding by the standards a public school must. It does not seem like an effective use of taxpayer dollars.

If this lack of oversight over the taxpayer dollars going to private schools continues and the trend of public schools closing continues, there could be a ‘too big to fail’ for private schools. The public could be on the hook for more of a financial burden than if wisely accounting for taxpayer dollars in the public education realm. The bailouts have only grown for agriculture after the sustainable price supports were taken away. Like when the cost to taxpayers goes up when there is no local journalism, holding the government accountable will be the best use of taxpayer dollars unlike subsidizing a private industry.

Everyone has a joke or two about the use of taxpayer dollars in some form of government, possibly including public schools. Everyone probably has a complaint about their public school experience, but this is what democracy is about. Equal opportunity to succeed and equal opportunity to gripe. Private schools are not that.

At the end of the day, every child deserves a great education. Not every child can afford private school or can be accepted into a private school. Despite the ESAs, schools can still raise tuition enough to not help all those who might benefit from attending a private school. When this hurts taxpayers and public schools, is the government truly serving the people with ESAs? These private schools sound more like the big agricultural companies using the bailouts to pad their bottom line at the expense of the public. For a state with a one room schoolhouse on the back of its quarter, this is a shame. These small town, rural schools like Ventura meant something to the public. They meant more than money.

Sean Dengler is a writer, comedian, now-retired beginning farmer, and host of the Pandaring Talk podcast who grew up on a farm between Traer and Dysart. You can reach him at sean.h.dengler@gmail.com.