Idaho charter school rejects lottery funds

By Rebecca Boone
The Associated Press

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BOISE, Idaho — Hoping to set a moral example for students, school-board members at an Idaho charter school have turned down nearly $10,000 from the Idaho State Lottery.

The money would have been useful, said Gale Pooley, co-founder and chairman of the board for North Star Public Charter School. But board members decided that accepting gambling money would conflict with the school's mission of developing virtuous citizens, he said.

"We couldn't in good conscience take the money," Pooley said. "As a board, we really looked at the methods that the lottery commission uses and the target market. It's the less fortunate and the poor in the communities who are buying these tickets, and children are the ones who will pay for it.

"Families that could be using the money for health care and even education are being convinced that all their problems could be solved by buying these tickets."

But Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multistate Lottery Association in Iowa, said more than 70 percent of the population plays the lottery, not just poor people.

"It's hard to argue with those holier-than-thou types, but that's just not true. Imagine yourself starting a business: Who would you target, people with money or the poor? Lotteries bring in $40 billion a year in this country, and poor people don't have $40 billion," Strutt said.

Strutt said the refusal was unprecedented, to his knowledge.

Pooley said North Star's decision did not meet much resistance from parents. Of 270 students, only about 10 parents called to complain. One unhappy parent, however, was Jennifer Butler, who has three sons attending North Star.

"I'm really disappointed with the board's decision," she said. "They didn't consult parents about it, and we could really use the money. I don't believe in the lottery personally, but the state budget says the money is to go to education, and that's our share of the money."
 
Allison Westfall, state Department of Education spokeswoman, said North Star is the first Idaho school to turn down funding from the state lottery. North Star is in Eagle, an upscale bedroom community just outside Boise.

Since it was created by voters in 1989, the Idaho lottery has paid more than $250 million to public buildings and schools, lottery officials say, with half of that specifically earmarked for public schools. This year, schools shared $12.5 million.

The $9,532 check from the lottery represented less than 1 percent of North Star's $1.2 million annual budget, or about 20 cents per student per day, Pooley said.

"I'd like to say we're lucky the check wasn't for $2 million or $10 million," Pooley joked. "But the bottom line is that we can operate the school given the funds we have, do a good job and still hold to some moral principles that our students can observe in this process. We felt that not accepting the money was in the best interest of moral and academic excellence."

The rejected money is likely to be thrown back into the lottery's pool for distribution next year.

Checks with several states that funnel lottery money to education found no precedent.

Tom Dunn, spokesman for the New York State Department of Education, said he had never heard of a school turning down its share of the more than $21 billion provided by New York's state lottery.

California's state lottery has provided more than $14 billion for schools, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. California State Department of Education spokeswoman Deborah Kennedy said no public school there had turned down the money.

Frank Pinela with Florida's state lottery said that although the $14 billion in education funding there is funneled through the state Legislature first, he had never heard of a school turning down lottery funds. Officials with the Florida State Department of Education said the same.