I hope that all Tribune readers have taken the time to go through the full text of HB148 that was printed in the Sept. 19 Tribune. There are several red flags that we all need to be concerned with. Prominent are: Parents accepting the tuition “scholarship” automatically are refusing services pursuant to the Federal Individuals With Disabilities Act; the State Board of Education must “cross-check enrollment lists of scholarship students, school districts, and youth in custody to ensure that scholarship payments are not erroneously made,” and the board must also “investigate complaints and convene administrative hearings for any alleged violation” concerning the board’s right to deny a private school permission to enroll “scholarship” students, or its right to interrupt or withhold disbursement of “scholarship” payments.

The last two flags should be neon red, since they will no doubt require the creation of an entirely new bureaucracy to comply.

But what does one expect when one buys a $99 car?

John R. Peterson

If I were an officer in the Sutherland Institute, I would raise questions over the historical research in “Vouchers, Vows, and Vexations: The Historic Dilemma Over Utah’s Education Identity,” (Paul Mero, Sutherland Institute, 2007) that purports to relate the history of Utah’s public and private schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Had the author bothered to read some of the secondary literature on the topic, he would have come to a much different conclusion.

Click here for the holes.

* THOMAS G. ALEXANDER is the Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor of Western American History at Brigham Young University, emeritus, where he taught for 40 years. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Utah, Western, Mormon and environmental history.