Iowa school district rejects Christian ministry's offer to buy vacant building

"It’s not a sound business decision" to sell to the competition, said one district official

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Last year, a public school board in Iowa rejected a bid from a Christian ministry that offered to buy a vacant building in order to create a private religious school.

It just happened again—and right in time, too.

The Cedar Rapids School Board had two elementary schools that were closing down and so they naturally wanted to sell the properties to get the most bang for their buck. Last month, the two best proposals were approved.

Arthur Elementary was sold to the Eastern Iowa Arts Academy for $130,000 and the promise of a “ten-year partnership to provide free arts programming in the Cedar Rapids school district to supplement existing art, music, and physical education classes.”

Garfield Elementary was sold to developer Steve Emerson for $160,000. He plans to convert the building into about 20 apartments. He also promised the district that high school students enrolled in trade classes could get hands-on work renovating the building and two of the completed apartments could be used by the district to house students or faculty members.

It all sounds pretty non-controversial.

Until you learn that another group offered to buy Garfield Elementary for $375,000 and the district rejected the offer.

That’s because the bid was placed by Isaac Newton Christian Academy, a private Christian school overseen by Linn Christian Academy.

The board members decided that selling the building to the Christian ministry would effectively undercut their own mission. As the district’s Chief Financial Officer Karla Hogan put it, selling the building to the Christian school would mean selling to the competition.

She has a point. Last year, Iowa Republicans enacted a law giving taxpayer dollars to families enrolling their kids in private schools. Nearly 19,000 kids were signed up to receive these vouchers last school year, at a cost of up to “$7,635 per student.” Critics of these ESAs have said the private/religious schools accepting these dollars may be unregulated, lack accountability, don’t necessarily accommodate students with special needs, and siphon away money that could be used to maintain and improve public schools.

So it makes a lot of sense for a public school board, whose primary obligation is to serve families receiving a public education, to reject a bid from a Christian school that would inevitably make life worse for public school students.

There’s nothing anti-Christian about that sentiment. It’s more like the public school board doesn’t want to contribute to its own demise. And they shouldn’t have to. There’s nothing stopping the Christian ministry from launching their school somewhere else. More importantly, the short term cash from any sale wouldn’t be worth the long-term damage to public education.

Hogan had numbers to back up her theory. For every student who leaves public school to enter a private Christian school, it’s a loss of funding for the district.

“Last year, a loss of $1.5 million from our general fund was attributed to the 196 students choosing Isaac Newton Christian Academy,” said Hogan. “Considering the potential to double their student county, our financial losses also double.”

…

“It’s not a sound business decision to sell these properties to organizations that will affect the overall financial health of our district,” said Hogan.

The Christian ministry says the enrollment number is much smaller—closer to 40 students—but the point still stands. Even if the Christian ministry offered a higher bid, which sounds great in the short-term, it would be a long-term loss for the public school district.

Iowa Republicans know this is happening and they recently passed a law (SF 2368) requiring school districts to sell vacant buildings to the highest bidder. That law doesn’t go into effect until the new school year, which technically began July 1, which is why the district was eager to finalize the sales last month.

It’s the right move. But since conservative Christians will inevitably treat this story as one of religious persecution, it’s important to recognize the real story is about how to best support public education at a time when conservatives are eager to destroy them in part by using vouchers as a way to funnel taxpayer dollars out of public education and into schools that offer religious indoctrination.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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