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LINCOLN — Months after a tense election cycle to repeal the state’s two latest school choice laws, the former state senator who wrote those bills and the current president of the state teacher’s union spent Saturday debating the future of education policy, with a focus on Nebraska students in need.
Lou Ann Linehan, the former state senator for the Elkhorn area, and Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, sat side by side for the 50th annual Nebraska Ecumenical Legislative Briefing Day at Christ United Methodist Church in Lincoln.
They debated school choice andmore for about an hour, offering competing visions for what the next steps should be to change the “status quo.”
The pair have crossed paths in and out of the Legislature, often clashing in recent years in Linehan’s two committees: Revenue and Education. Royers was past president of the Millard Education Association, and Linehan chaired the Revenue Committee for six years.
Beyond policy disagreements, the two have found common ground in Linehan-led and teacher-backed efforts to increase support for students struggling with reading, including dyslexia, which Linehan has, and to increase state funding for schools, largely to offset the amount of school spending relying on property taxes.
Linehan also assisted Royers, acivics and government teacher for Millard before ascending to the top NSEA post lastfall,bypersonallyreplyingin writing to students or otherwise engaging with them Oil assignments and presentations that Royers devised.
Most recently, Linehan and Royers were among the public faces of Nebraska’s school choice “battle,” as Linehan described it Saturday, hosting dueling rallies for and against Linehan’s past laws.
It was afightthatsometimes got personal, including Linehan questioning whethertheunionhadthe best interests of children or families at heart and the union pointing out Linehan’s familial connection to the American Federation for Children. Her daughter works for the group.
Expanded choice or limited help
Linehan, who was term-limited last month after eight years, led the passage of two laws in her final two years to help Nebraska families cover the costs of attending a private K-12 school, after multiple earlier attempts.
“I’ve always been able to choose and pick [what was best for my children] because I had the financial ability and the knowledge to do so, and I don’t think that choice should be limited to just those with means,” Linehan said Saturday.
NSEA-backed Support Our Schools and Linehan-backed Keep Kids First raised and spent more than $9 million combined, for and against the referendum measures in 2023 and 2024. Support Our Schools accountedfor 83% of that total fundraising and spending.
A key reason for the imbalance: Linehan and her supporters largely declined to fight the 2024 referendum.
Royers said option enrollment, which allows parents to apply and possibly move their child to a different district or school than the one they live closest to, gives parents a choice in publicschools,whichLinehan supports.
However, she has criticized option enrollment for leaving some students behind, particularly those receiving special education or those who can’t afford transportation to a different school or district.
If there’s an issue with a neighborhood school, those should be resolved first, Royers said. He said he and Linehan have a “philosophical disagreement” on how best to meet the needs of Nebraska students.
“All of those kids deserve to have the education they should need,” Royers said. “It shouldn’t just be that we provide a lifeboat to a handful of kids to go somewhere else.”
The annual Ecumenical Briefing Day focuses on the assumption that part of living under God’s grace means “fighting for justice for those oppressed or in need whose voices go unheard.”
Linehan and Royers also weighed in on how to best support underperforming schools, what possible ramifications could come of federal calls to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and whether chaplains should be allowed to serve as school counselors.
Among NSEA’s main concerns that Royers voiced Saturday: Private school tuition sometimes skyrockets after suchlaws pass, keeping private education out of reach for some of the families that supporters of the laws say they want to help. This often leads to families with children already in private schools being the biggest beneficiaries of expanded scholarship or voucher programs.
The dollar-for-dollar tax credits disproportionately benefit a specific type of donation, to private school scholarship organizations, that doesn’t apply equally to other donations, such as to public school foundations. Some have suggested expanding the tax credit program to include those public school foundations as a compromise.
Thescholarshiporvoucherprograms apply to all private schools that have been “approved” or “accredited” by the state. Royers noted accreditation requires a higher standard. He said he knows there are great private schools, but he argued that all are accredited. He said the application process to be an “approved” school isjust one page long.
