Freedom to Learn

Jenny Clark on Students with Disabilities, Education Freedom, & Loving Your School

• Ginny Gentles • Season 1 • Episode 20

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Arizona mother Jenny Clark shares her family's challenging educational journey and how these experiences led her to establish Love Your School, an organization that provides personalized support for parents navigating educational options. Jenny describes how Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) provide families, including families of students with disabilities, with the flexibility to tailor their children’s education to better meet their needs. Jenny shares insights from her experience testifying at a congressional hearing in support of school choice and her hope that the proposed federal Education Choice for Children Act (ECCA) will expand educational options nationwide.

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Ginny Gentles (0:00)

Welcome to Freedom to Learn, the podcast that champions choice in education, defends parental rights, and exposes the harm caused by school unions. I'm Ginny Gentles, Director of Education, Freedom, and Parental Rights at DFI, the Defense of Freedom Institute in Washington, DC.

A U.S. House Education and the Workforce subcommittee recently held a lively education freedom hearing called "Education Without Limits: Exploring the Benefits of School Choice."  We’re talking to participants in the hearing over a series of Freedom to Learn episodes - tackling the education myths that we heard and exploring the witnesses' key messages. Our guest today, Jenny Clark, shares her family’s school choice story and explains how education freedom helps students with disabilities and their families.


Jenny Clark is a mother of five, a former member of the Arizona State Board of Education, a school choice advocate, and a product of public schools. She founded Love Your School in 2019 to help families navigate education options and help them find the right fit for their children.


Jenny Clark, welcome to Freedom to Learn.


Jenny Clark (1:04)

Thank you for having me.


Ginny Gentles (1:06)

Let's start with your family's story. You have five children. What has their educational journey been like?


Jenny Clark (1:11)

Oh well, it's been so many different things, but initially we started out homeschooling our three oldest boys all the way through the pandemic. We did a variety of different programs during that time from Classical Conversations to our own, eventually homeschool, microschool in our home for several years. And before my kids ended up in their current environment, which is a hybrid school three days a week, we even hired a former public school teacher to educate our kids and another family at home.

So we've done a lot of different and interesting things and it has changed every few years.


Ginny Gentles (1:46)

So, was your family's experience what inspired you to launch Love Your School?


Jenny Clark (1:52)

Yes, absolutely. So our experience really early on with homeschooling was very positive. However, as the primary educator, I was realizing that my two oldest boys were really struggling to learn how to read. And as some folks know from my story before, but I'll share it again, we had a friend who told us about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Child Find, and that even though we were homeschooling, we could go to the public school and have our children evaluated for free. So we started down that road and that process.

And essentially we're told that, you know, it was our fault that our kids, our two boys weren't reading. And that it was lack of a proper education. And my husband and I, my husband was in law school at the time and I had a master's and I'm like, it's not that. We have been trying so hard, but like day to day, our kids are forgetting like the sounds of letters that they mastered the day before. 

Eventually we got independent educational evaluations at the school district's expense and found out they had severe dyslexia and dysgraphia and a few other different things. 

That process and the fact that it took me like a year to get through that whole process, it really was the thing that led me to launch Love Your School because I thought I've got time, I've got energy to be able to do this. What about all the parents that don't know the laws and they don't have the time for this? And so that and then wanting families to know about school choice options, because we did end up on an ESA and it was difficult, we just really wanted to help more parents.


Ginny Gentles (3:19)

Yeah you and I have talked about this. As you go through the IEP process, you get really emotional on behalf of your own children as you advocate for them and really fight back against the system who seems really resistant to work with you. But also, I get emotional on behalf of other parents, parents who might not know that they can fight and that they can advocate. They might not know how to comb through IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and find out that the district needs to pay for the evaluation. So the fact that you were taking action on behalf of your kids, but then also taking action on behalf of all these other struggling parents is something that's really admirable. So what exactly does Love Your School do?


Jenny Clark (4:05)

So Love Your School provides personalized support to parents in Arizona, West Virginia, and Alabama. So kind of what that looks like, just thinking of the parent support cases I've helped with even just this morning, is that a parent reaches out to us. They're either referred to us by maybe a school or a therapist, or they find us on social media, or a friend introduces them to us, and they'll send us an email or a direct message on social media or call us. And usually it starts with, “hey, I wanna tell you about my kiddo and we're struggling with X.” And X can be bullying, X could be learning to read, it could be that they just wanna find a school that's closer to where they live. And so we basically say that we take parents from problem to solution in their child's K-12 journey. 

So we do an intake with the parent, we find out more about their child and what maybe their issues or concerns are. And then we start to immediately provide guidance to them. So it could look like us saying, hey, you do have the right to an evaluation. And here's all the information. Here's the email address for the school. Here's suggested language that you can use. And we're going to stick with you throughout this entire process. It could look like we do a school search for them, stuff that meets their criteria. 

Just recently, we had a family that was denied for our state's ESA program. And we believe that they were denied incorrectly. And so we helped the parent not only walk through that process, but we advocated on their behalf to actually get their funding increased because it was a student with a significant disability. 

So we're helping parents all day, every day, a lot of times nights and weekends. If I get a text over the weekend or I see a direct message on Instagram and I know the answer, I'm like, I'm just gonna tackle this right now. Because I know the feeling of being a parent and just like waiting and struggling and needing help.


Ginny Gentles (5:52)

So you're based in Arizona. Is Love Your School Arizona only or are you serving parents elsewhere as well?


Jenny Clark (5:59)

So our main headquarters, everything is based out of Arizona. So of course we serve the most families right now in Arizona. And then we have a small team in West Virginia, a small team in Alabama. And we hope to do more states that have specifically ESA and choice programs. Because a lot of times that's where things start to get confusing and sticky for parents. A lot of families do not even know about ESA programs. We still encounter that in Arizona especially with families who have a child entering like kinder or first grade. So families need to know about the programs. And then even if they are aware of the program, they can get nervous. They're like, okay, well, if I go do this and it doesn't work, can I go back? If I decide I want to homeschool, like, can you help me with that? Are there resources? Is there a community that can help me maybe try this ESA program in my state? And so we do that in those three states. And again, hopefully, hopefully more states. 


One of the things that we really like doing is training parents to help other parents. We are gonna be launching this fall in Arizona, a education navigator training because we want to really multiply the number of parents that know what their rights are. And so right now our Facebook group in Arizona, we have groups in all three states that we're presently in. It has about 11,500 families in it. And I love jumping on there to like search for an answer for something for a parent maybe I'm working with, and I see all these other parents that we have elevated to experts in our Facebook group, just responding out of like the kindness of their hearts to other moms that are asking just all sorts of amazing questions. It's really cool. It's a neat community. And that's the very like nitty gritty one-on-one support that we've got to provide for parents because the decision about how your child is going to be educated is a really big decision. And it requires a lot of personalized support.


Ginny Gentles (7:50)

That community and support is so important when you're talking about families with students with disabilities, because that experience can be incredibly isolating and for sure it's exhausting. By the end of the day, if you have a child with ADHD or somewhere on the spectrum, you're wiped out. So the idea of clicking around government websites or some of these legacy organizations and trying to find something in the Q&A, it's not going to work. So that's an incredible resource that you've created there. 

You've navigated this for your family. You've helped families in multiple states navigate. Tell us exactly what you're navigating when you're talking about ESAs. What's an ESA?


Jenny Clark (8:35)

Yes, so an ESA is an Education Savings Accounts and in each state sometimes they have, you know, different names like, you know, the CHOOSE Act or the HOPE Scholarship. Ours is called the Empowerment Scholarship. But essentially what ESAs do is allow families to opt out of their traditional locally zoned public school system and to take a portion usually of those funds to either a private school or a home education or micro school, some other education environment of their choice.

Different states have different rules about what the ESA can be used for. But just to continue and take Arizona as an example, our ESA is 90% of what the state funds per student in the public school system. And we get to take those funds and we get to use them for a variety of different things. Arizona is pretty flexible for home education, micro schools, and private schools. 

The neat thing about Arizona's program, and I'm hoping more states will do similar, is that it includes the special education or students with disabilities funding multiplier. And so basically what that means is that students that have a disability that's diagnosed either through a private diagnosis or through the school district, you know, an IEP 504 process, they are able to access even more funding for their student. And so that makes ESA programs honestly like even better for families who have a student with disability, because let's say, I have a student with dyslexia, now one of those kids is in high school, we get about 900 extra dollars a year on top of our additional ESA. If you have a student with autism, the amount goes up to more like 30 to $34,000 per year depending on their age and their grade. And so that's really unlocking a lot of funding and incredible options for those families. And families are always shocked when I point out that's still only 90% and only of the state funding.

And I'm like, do you think that your student with autism was getting that much in services and funding in the public school? And a lot of times they're like, no, they weren't.


Ginny Gentles (10:36)

Yeah I have a good friend in Florida whose child was really struggling to read in the public system. She used one of Florida's education freedom programs, transferred to a private school, and then learned how much money her child was allocated by the state and then was irate that she received no resources or support or help with this problem that meant that she couldn't read the whole time she was in the public school system. All that money went who knows where. 

So Jenny, I'm really excited about delving into a conversation about a congressional hearing that you testified at, but let's start with a White House round table that you participated in early in the Trump administration. Tell us about that experience.


Jenny Clark (11:23)

Oh that was such a wonderful experience. So I was invited because of my advocacy work with Love Your School to be one of the parents that got to participate in that roundtable. So it was just a fantastic lunch with incredible education advocates.

So we had Congressman Donalds there and of course his wife Erika Donald's fantastic pro school choice family and couple. A few different governors, Governor Youngkin, Governor Sanders, Governor Landry. And the president was very focused and I was just so thankful and so impressed. So focused on finding ways that we could unlock more education options for students. We got into some really nitty-gritty policy discussions about not just state ESAs and which ESA models seem to be the most effective for students, but also the ECCA (Educational Choice for Children Act).

So there was a lot of discussion even about that, particularly because the nation's report card or the NAEP scores had just come out and it was also National School Choice Week. And so this whole conversation around how just a really small number of students are actually reading proficiently in America is very concerning that it's a national crisis, almost a national emergency. And so we were all fresh from that information. And then also discussion about these potential national tax credits and state programs. And so was like, we've got a lot of work to do. We've got, you know, two, almost three decades now of academic declines that are even worse since COVID. Like, what are the immediate levers that we can pull to start fixing this? And so really great conversations. 

One thing I will say, I was just so impressed that President Trump was willing to let people challenge him. He, you know, on several occasions said, you know, “does anyone disagree with me?” “Do any of you disagree with this idea or what we're talking about here? Like, I want to hear from you.” And that just blew me away. And just the knowledge to which he understood what the problem was and really wanted to find solutions for parents. Like, we're dealing with this at the nitty gritty level of our own children. And so there's that, you know, the small scale, but then also the bigger scale of we're concerned about our country and we're concerned about American school children.


And then after that, we were all, all very shocked because the event was supposed to last, you know, a strict hour. I mean, it's the president of the United States that we were then invited to go into the Oval Office. And, you know, the president canceled another meeting that he had had and invited us all into the Oval Office and then took time for more conversation and photos. So it was just such a special time. And I was so thankful to be there. Definitely felt underqualified to be in the room.


Ginny Gentles (14:07)

Well, Jenny, you mentioned it was during National School Choice Week. So if you think about it, he was inaugurated in January. National School Choice Week happens, I think it was probably end of January, beginning of February. This was a priority for this administration. Education freedom, expanding options, addressing our nation's educational crisis right now. So that's exciting. Fortunately, Congress is taking action as well. There was a recent congressional hearing that was focused on school choice. This was a subcommittee.


Ginny Gentles (13:24)

of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. And you came back to Washington, thank you, to testify. Other witnesses were Walter Blanks, who benefited from a scholarship program when he was growing up in Ohio, Mike McShane from EdChoice, who knows the research backwards and forwards. And then you came and shared your story. You were only given three minutes. A lot of times opening statements are five. What did you want to convey in that opening statement?


Jenny Clark (15:03)

Well, one of the things I really wanted to convey is just that my story is not unique, that there are literally millions of families all across America who have had similar difficulties, both navigating the public education system or the public education system just not working for their kids. We were very open to potentially enrolling our kids in the public school system if they had said, we offer programs for dyslexic students. But of course, as I shared in my testimony, they said, we'll just offer you 30 minutes of sight word support a week. And I'm like, that is not what a dyslexic kiddo needs. 

So I really wanted to share that my story is not unique and then also really emphasize just how transformational education savings accounts are. Because I know what the narrative is from those organizations that really oppose parent choice and oppose unlocking families and giving them more options for their kids' education. I wanted to make sure that they knew just how transformational it was and that also students with disabilities love these programs and they're benefiting from these programs because a big piece of rhetoric, if you will, that opponents are using is that these programs somehow hurt rural families or they hurt students with disabilities when nothing could be farther from the truth.


Ginny Gentles (16:17)

We definitely heard that throughout the hearing from one side of the aisle and one of the witnesses. We definitely heard that all of this is just a big scam or scheme that will somehow benefit billionaires. So I thought that was very interesting with Walter and you sitting there saying, this is how it benefited me. This is how it changed my life's trajectory, my family's trajectory. And then you kept being told that this was just a scam to benefit billionaires. It was interesting to watch. I was sitting behind you during the experience. 

Any surprises for you?


Jenny Clark (16:53)

I was a little bit surprised about how willing opponents of, you know, school choice and ESAs, some of the members of the subcommittee, how willing they were to try to like discount and discredit like our actual experiences, right? 


Ginny Gentles (17:09)

Your lived experience.


Jenny Clark (17:11)

Yes, like, you know, and a few of the questions, obviously, they had dug into my written testimony, which they get a chance to review and their staff reviews before we testify.


And they really wanted to make me out to be some sort of, super wealthy family that, you know, was benefiting and getting all of this money. They said, you know, well, how did you pay for this independent educational evaluation? I'm like, the public school paid for it. It's part of the law. Like you're allowed to disagree with the district and ask for them to pay for an independent evaluation because those evaluations are $3,500 a piece. It's crazy. 

And then they also made a comment about, you know, me being a stay at home mom and homeschooling and they asked if I was able to do that because we had a stable income and you know, I was chuckling inside because I'm like, no, we literally my husband we lived on loans. My husband was in law school for those three years when we were figuring all of this out. Like it was our income was loans. We're still paying those school loans. And so it really just flew in the face of the narrative I think that they were trying to portray. 

But then I stopped and thought a little bit more about that later and I thought you know, what if we did have a stable income during that time for some reason, or what if we had paid for those evaluations kind of on our own? It doesn't change the reality that the public school receives funding for those things, regardless of what your family's income is, and they still weren't providing it, or they were challenging us at every step. 

And we always say in Arizona, when people try to say, it's only wealthy families using our state's ESA program and you know, those are families that could already afford private school. We've actually done the research and we're like, actually more families that you would consider, let's say wealthy or higher income are going to the public school and taxpayers are spending more money on those kids in the public school system than on ESAs. And we know that there's no income requirement for the public school system. And so I think a lot of their arguments really fall apart when you start to kind of navigate through them.


Ginny Gentles (19:13)

I was shocked when a congresswoman was insistent that the amount of funding that you received through the ESA was not sufficient to educate your child with disabilities and basically implied that you were wrong in answering that it was. Tell us what unfolded.


Jenny Clark (19:31)

One of the congresswomen basically said you received $7,500. And I said, you know, per student, that's what our ESA was per student. And at that time, I think it was only two of our kids that were on and then our third one got on like a year later. And and she's like, and that covered all of your services. And I was trying to process really quickly what she was saying, but it didn't just pay for the dyslexia services, it paid for a lot of other things too. But there wasn't you know, your kind of timed, so there wasn't really even chance to explain that. But not only did the $7,500 cover the dyslexia curriculum and a lot of the tutoring that we had for our two boys at the time, we were paying for course occupational therapy for one of our kids at the time. We were paying for speech therapy with the ESA at the time. We were paying for various like online programs, typing and handwriting programs. So it was the dyslexia therapy and then some, and the $7,500 was more than enough.

And the congresswoman was trying to say that, you in the public school system, that would be, you know, way, way more. And, you know, for folks listening, it's like, that's not the case. Like you could get one staff member trained in dyslexia specific interventions, and that one staff member could conceivably tutor dozens of kids, for a single salary. So the cost would be even lower. And so I just, I think they were really trying to say, there's just no way that you could help a child with dyslexia for only $7,500 a year. And I'm like, yes you can, and then some, you know?


Ginny Gentles (21:05)

Right. And any parent listening who has a child who needed occupational therapy will know it is, I don't know, impossible to get occupational therapy through the public school. That was a fight that I fought for years and then just gave up. And you have to end up paying for it privately outside of school. So the fact that you were able to throw in the OT in addition to everything else that you were doing with that ESA is fantastic. And it's what every family deserves and every child with special needs deserves. 

There were some statistics that you threw around because people do like to claim it's a scam, it's a scheme, it hurts students with disabilities. And they think the real kicker is to say when a child leaves the public system, they give up their IDEA, FAPE rights, free appropriate public education, implying that why would anyone ever want to do this? So give us a sense of kind how you were responding to some of those allegations.


Jenny Clark (22:02)

Absolutely. So yes, that's exactly right. A lot of times what attorneys or opponents of ESA programs will say is, you know, just so you know, the thing they're not telling you is that you lose FAPE and you lose IDEA rights. And so my response is always, well, you lose some of them, but if you decide that your child's not better off on an ESA, you can always go back to the public school system. However, what the data shows in Arizona, and I like to use Arizona as an example because we have had our ESA for students with disabilities for over 12 years now, so there's lots of good data. But also our Arizona quarterly ESA report had just come out a few days prior, which was very helpful. But Arizona's program consistently has a higher number of students with disabilities using our ESA compared to the students with disabilities percentage in the public school. In Arizona public schools, you have about 14% of the students on an IEP or a 504 plan. On our ESA program, you have over 18%.

And then of that 18%, because it's broken down into the 13 disability categories, over 50% of those students with disabilities on our state's ESA are students with autism. And so, you know, I'm just always trying to point out, and I tried to in that hearing, that if you're trying to say that families with disabilities are being hurt by going on an ESA, and because they lose their rights, then why are those families choosing the program in greater percentages than in the public school system? Well, it's because most of us on the ESA already know that we don't think our kids were actually getting those services in the public school system. And even if we were, we often had to fight great emotional time and toil, tears and IEP meetings, even then to get the most basic of services-


Ginny Gentles (23:42)

Lawyers.


Jenny Clark (22:43)

And lawyers. And that was the next thing I was gonna say. Everyone knows if you really wanna get what you think your child needs, you're gonna have to hire an attorney in order to force the district to respond. Most people do not have time or money for that. We certainly didn't.


Ginny Gentles (23:58)

Jenny, I feel like one of the most emotional parts of the hearing for me was when you said that if, you know you're parent of a child with disabilities, if you've cried at an IEP meeting, and that's frequently what I talk about, I cried in my car after every IEP meeting.

So I sit through these hearings and just, kind of want to scream and shout like, what are you talking about? You don't understand the experience of a parent of a child with disabilities. You are pretending that this system offers something that it doesn't. And these parents, these students, they deserve so much more than what they're getting right now, for the most part, at the public system.

So I wish everyone would just listen to you, listen to those of us who've had to pull our child out, listen to the parents who've had to sue and hire very expensive lawyers and recognize that we're talking about a very broken system and that something needs to be changed. And fortunately, these education freedom programs are something that is changing and is expanding options and hopefully will inspire the public system to shape up if they wanna keep students. Any other thoughts on the hearing before we wrap up?


Jenny Clark (25:11)

Overall, I thought it was just a wonderful experience I was really impressed and thankful for the questions on both sides because even when you have opponents that are trying to grill you it gives you an opportunity to dispel myths about ESAs and these types of programs and anytime we could have those conversations out in the public right for American citizens to see I think that we're all better off


Ginny Gentles (25:35)

I'd like to loop back before we finish on the Educational Choice for Children Act, the ECCA. It sounds like that's something that you're supportive of. Like you're in a state that already has choice on the go. So what has inspired you to engage on that particular policy issue?


Jenny Clark (25:51)

Yeah, absolutely. So in Arizona, we do have tuition tax credit scholarships and we have our ESA program. But unfortunately, parents haven't been able to use those two things together. And I really want to see that. I want to see parents being able to unlock, you know, all the different ways that they can get funding and opt out of the public school system if it's not working for their student. And so I love the idea that families could utilize an education savings account and then potentially stack that with the ECCA, if that ends up being allowed in order to cover the private school tuition. Everybody knows that there's a narrative out there that private school tuition somehow goes up when you have these school choice programs. Reality is that's not the case. And most of these private schools offer slim to no profit margin. And so the tuition is often forced to be very, very low or families are forced to make up the difference if tuition is, let's even say even a thousand dollars more than the ESA covers. And some states don't have the multiplier that Arizona has for students with disabilities. West Virginia is one such example. So it can be a little bit more difficult in some states to opt out if your child has a disability. 

So I love the idea that families could use the ESA or whatever the state scholarship is and the ECCA to help them get into even some of these specialty schools or to pay for tuition and some services for their students. 

So that's one of the reasons why I'm supportive of the ECCA personally and I'm excited to see where it goes.


Ginny Gentles (27:21)

Yeah, we shall see lots of discussions on Capitol Hill with the big reconciliation bill. How can people follow your work?


Jenny Clark (27:27)

So we are on all social media platforms. We're on Instagram @loveyourschoolAZ and then @loveyourschoolAL, @loveyourschoolWV for our other states. We're on X, @Iheartmyschool, and of course on Facebook at Love Your School.


Ginny Gentles (27:44)

Well, Jenny Clark, thank you for your commitment to education freedom, to families who so deserve support, and thank you for joining Freedom to Learn.


Jenny Clark (27:53)

Thank you so much for having me.


Ginny Gentles (27:57)
Freedom to Learn is a production of the Defense of Freedom Institute. You can learn more about DFI at DFIpolicy.org. If you have feedback or suggestions for future podcasts, please reach out to us at podcast@DFIpolicy.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.