Court action leads to reduced school fees

Parents registering their kids for school are not seeing a lot of the fees they have in the past. That’s because of a lawsuit in the West Ada School District.

A grandparent complained that the Idaho Constitution says students are entitled to a free public education, yet fees were often required. The judge agreed that, “where a class is offered as part of the regular academic courses of the school, the course must be offered without charge.” Fees for extracurricular activities such as sports may be charged.

Idaho Falls School District 91 superintendent George Boland says the impact is significant.

“We’ve gone from about four pages of fees to extracurricular fees only,” Boland said. “We’ve eliminated at the elementary level all fees, and at the secondary level any fees associated with any course. There used to be fees for example in the science classes for some consumables.”

So now the school district will have to pick up the costs of those fees which is a considerable amount.

“The net result of that is about $140,000 dollars that used to be collected in fees we will no longer collect, and so we need to back fill that. Fortunately the economy’s better and we did receive some additional operational funds through the state.”

Boland says that when it comes to fees, there’s an understanding that schools need to comply with the Idaho Constitution, and this is just the way business is going to be done going forward.