On a warm February morning, Principal Condra Allred moved through the narrow halls of Cleveland Elementary, a 76-year-old building with the familiar sounds of a busy school: a walkie-talkie calling for playground coverage, requests for bathroom breaks, and staff soothing a distressed child. Allred, with a pink fanny pack slung over one shoulder, can handle many daily crises, but she cannot stop district officials from weighing whether to close her school.
The Cedar Rapids Community School District, strapped for cash and losing students, is considering shuttering as many as six elementary schools to reduce costs. The worry is personal for Allred: if her building closes, what will happen to her staff, her students — even her son’s question: “Are you gonna have a job?”
The district’s budget troubles are tied less to a single aging building and more to a changing policy environment. In recent years Iowa’s Republican leadership expanded school-choice options: charter schools opened, open enrollment lets families attend other public districts, and Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) now offer roughly $8,000 per child to help pay private tuition. Gov. Kim Reynolds has framed the approach as funding students rather than systems. For Cedar Rapids, that means competing for families and the funding that follows them.
More than 4,000 children who live in Cedar Rapids now attend schools other than their neighborhood public schools through open enrollment, the new charter, or ESAs. The district still serves just over 14,000 students, a number that had been declining slowly but fell faster this year. Voters have twice rejected bond measures the district sought to cover shortfalls.
The city’s high-profile competitor is Cedar Rapids Prep, a new charter middle school expanding quickly. Prep is renovating a former office building into a modern campus with amenities such as Apple computers, a college-level science lab and an indoor slide between floors. Much of the renovation has been financed by billionaire philanthropist Joe Ricketts.
Although charters are public and must follow state rules and nondiscriminatory admissions policies, the district estimates it lost roughly 230 students to Cedar Rapids Prep last fall — each student taking more than $8,000 in combined state and local funding. Those departures reduce resources for neighborhood schools while the district still must cover fixed costs.
Families who left describe chronic problems at their former public schools: widespread disruption, fights and teachers stretched thin. Oscar and Adam Kaiz-Vera moved three children to Prep after their daughter, who needs extra learning support, wasn’t getting attention because staff were managing constant disruptive behavior. Cedar Rapids recorded nearly 4,000 incidents last year that led to suspension or expulsion; district leaders say some of that increase reflects better reporting and the lingering behavioral effects of the pandemic.
Prep has generated controversy beyond enrollment losses: its founding principal was arrested on a harassment charge in March and later fired. Even so, parents like the Kaiz-Veras say their children are thriving in the new environment.
Private schools are drawing families as well. Xavier Catholic Schools, which operates multiple elementary and middle campuses in Cedar Rapids, has historically been out of reach for many because of tuition. The ESA program, launched in 2023, changed that: this year about 98 percent of Xavier families used an ESA to offset costs.
Research on voucher-style programs suggests many ESA recipients were already enrolled in private schools before the subsidy arrived — a common early pattern — and one estimate indicated more than half of Iowa students using ESAs had previously attended private schools. That dynamic has helped push the ESA program’s cost to more than $300 million this year, drawing criticism from some officials who say public dollars are subsidizing families who would have paid private tuition anyway.
Still, ESAs have opened private options for families who otherwise could not afford them. Stephanie King, who is not Catholic, used an ESA to move her child to Xavier after concluding her local public school was too chaotic. She acknowledged that such moves can strain public-school finances but said parents must prioritize their children’s learning and safety.
At the same time, private schools remain less accessible to the poorest and most vulnerable students. Xavier’s student body is about 13 percent low-income compared with 57 percent in Cedar Rapids public schools. Private schools have the legal authority to screen or decline students for academic or behavioral reasons and may lack resources to serve students with significant special education needs. Research from Princeton economists suggests ESAs can create incentives for private schools to raise tuition; an unpublished update to that work found tuition rose roughly 40 percent by a program’s third year, meaning an $8,000 ESA may not fully cover costs.
The result is a concentration of higher-need students in public schools — more children with disabilities and more low-income students remain in neighborhood schools because they lack the means, transportation or legal access to leave. Cleveland Elementary itself hosts a districtwide special education program; its library has been subdivided for makeshift sensory spaces for children with autism. Allred said she has seen children start at choice schools and return within weeks when their needs prove difficult to manage there.
Cleveland’s enrollment has fallen from more than 300 students to about 250, making it a candidate for closure. Parents who stay worry about losing a community anchor. Antoine Jones, who works at Cleveland and has three children in the school, chose his home in part for access to the neighborhood school and fears the ripple effects if it shuts.
Demographic shifts are visible across the district. The share of white students in Cedar Rapids has declined over the past decade in part because open enrollment allows families to move to suburban districts. Meanwhile, public schools now have higher shares of students with disabilities and those living in poverty. Staff members say behavior reporting has improved and that post-COVID challenges increased incidents, but educators also say it’s becoming harder to teach as neighborhood schools serve a larger share of children with intense needs while losing per-pupil funding.
Iowa’s rapid embrace of choice reflects a broader national trend as states experiment with market-based approaches to education. In practice, these policies require traditional public districts to operate like competitors in a marketplace they were not designed to enter: recruiting families while covering the fixed costs of classrooms, buildings and specialized programs.
For families like the Kaiz-Veras and Stephanie King, choice has delivered better fits for their children. For principals like Allred and the families who remain, the system raises urgent equity concerns: who will care for children who cannot leave? The debate in Cedar Rapids — and statewide — centers on whether the expanding marketplace can be structured so all students, especially the most vulnerable, have access to stable, well-resourced schooling.
“Someone needs to love and care for these kids that nobody cares about,” Allred said. The question policymakers face is whether market-based reforms can guarantee that care for everyone.