Arkansas's school voucher application asked if parents were seeking 'a different racial mix of students'

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2025/03/13/arkansass-school-voucher-application-asked-if-parents-were-seeking-a-different-racial-mix-of-students

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.

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