2 Businessmen Pledge $100-Million to Send Poor Children to Private Schools

The Wall Street financier Theodore J. Forstmann and John T. Walton, heir to the Wal-Mart Stores empire, announced last week that they will contribute $50-million each to a new fund to help children from low-income families attend private schools.

The Children’s Scholarship Fund will distribute the $100-million in 30 to 50 cities. The money must be matched, dollar for dollar, by people in each of those cities, with the goal of providing $200-million.

The announcement came just a month after corporate leaders in San Antonio announced that they had pledged $50-million over the next decade to provide aid to poor students who wish to attend parochial or private schools (The Chronicle, May 7.)

The awards announced last week will pay for up to $1,300 in private-school tuition per year for poor kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. Families must come up with the rest of the money.

Students will be selected by lotteries held in the spring of 1999. Some 50,000 children are expected to receive scholarships in time to begin private school in the fall of 1999.

Five cities have already been selected: Chicago, Jersey City, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington. The remaining cities will be selected this summer.

Washington was a pilot site for the new scholarship program. Last year Mr. Walton and Mr. Forstmann, co-founder of the investment firm Forstmann Little & Company, pledged $6-million jointly to the Washington Scholarship Fund, a non-profit group created in 1993. The gift, enough to pay for 1,000 scholarships, drew more than 7,500 applications from low-income families.

Rodney Walker, a spokesman for the new program, said that the overwhelming demand in Washington persuaded the two philanthropists to expand the program into a national effort.

The scholarships are the latest development in a controversial debate over how to improve the ailing public-school system. Philanthropists such as Mr. Forstmann have argued that public schools constitute a monopoly and won’t improve without more competition.

Skeptics say, however, that such scholarships cannot cover all needy students and will further undermine public education. An effort by Congress to allot taxpayer dollars for vouchers that could be used in public or private schools failed last month, when President Clinton vetoed the bill.