On an unseasonably warm February morning, Principal Condra Allred walked the hallways of Cleveland Elementary School's 76-year-old building wearing a pink fanny pack slung over one shoulder like a bandolier. Inside the pack, a walkie-talkie squawked with the voices of staff who needed back-up on the playground, or a bathroom break, or help soothing a troubled student.
Allred had fixes for every crisis but one: How to keep the district from closing her school.
"My own son came home and said, 'Are you gonna have a job?'" Allred said of the day news broke that the Cedar Rapids Community School District in eastern Iowa is considering closing up to six elementary schools in a dramatic effort to cut costs.
If the school is closed, she said, her voice quavering, "I will go wherever the district needs me to go, but it is sad to think about not coming here with the staff that we have."
The problem for Cedar Rapids' cash-strapped district is that, while its schools haven't changed much in the last few decades – Cleveland isn't entirely wheelchair accessible and it has an old, obsolete fireplace in the library – the competition has been growing at the speed of light.
As in many Republican-controlled states in recent years, Iowa's leaders have gone all-in on school choice, pushing to create and expand alternatives to public schools. They've cleared the way for new public charter schools, including one that opened in Cedar Rapids last fall. Also new this year: Iowa offers any child in the state roughly $8,000 to help pay for private school.
In January, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds declared, "In Iowa, we fund students, not systems."
Little surprise, Cedar Rapids' system of public schools now finds itself in crisis, losing students and dollars and struggling to do something public schools are rarely asked to do: compete.
Twice in recent years the Cedar Rapids Community School District has asked voters for extra money, through a bond measure, to help. Twice voters have said no.
This year, more than 4,000 students living in Cedar Rapids are not using its public schools. Instead they're choosing alternatives like commuting to other public school districts through the state's open enrollment policy, enrolling in that brand new charter school or using Iowa's new Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) to attend a private school. Today, the district serves just over 14,000 students – a number that has been slowly declining for a decade. This year, though, the losses accelerated.
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With school choice programs ascendant across the U.S., and with the federal government preparing to launch its own voucher-like program next year, NPR traveled to Cedar Rapids to understand who wins and who loses when education meets the free market.
The competition: Cedar Rapids Prep
The city's newest charter school, Cedar Rapids Prep, is only in its first year as a middle school, but it's already renovating a future home to expand into next fall. The former office building is getting a multimillion dollar remodel.
Wearing a hard hat, the charter's principal, Justin Blietz, described his vision. "This area, which was all cubicles," he gestured into open space, "will be our science wing. So we'll have premiere lab space in the middle that will have all the features of a college-level lab."
The building's top selling point (for kids anyway) is a playground slide that descends from the second floor to the first-floor cafeteria. "It was not hard to sell our kids on moving to a new space," Blietz said.
Unlike the city's public schools, this costly construction is largely funded by one billionaire philanthropist, Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade. And so, in Iowa's new education marketplace, a public school system that's still trying to pay for long-delayed renovations is competing for families against a charter school that offers Apple computers, a college-level chemistry lab and an indoor slide.
Blietz, who used to work in Cedar Rapids' public schools, admitted he's taken heat from former colleagues and some strangers who feel he's helping the competition. "I've received anonymous mail saying, 'I hope you're glad you're ruining public education.' It hurts."
Technically, Blietz's charter school is part of the public system. It has to meet certain requirements set by the state, and it can't pick and choose which students to admit. That's why the student body at Prep, including the proportion of students with disabilities, is similar to that of the public schools.
But the district told NPR that it lost about 230 kids to Blietz's new school last fall, and each of them took more than $8,000 of state and local funding with them. So, even though Prep is a kind of public school, its gain is the district's financial loss.
Oscar and Adam Kaiz-Vera are among the families who chose to leave, moving three of their children out of their local public school and enrolling them at Prep. They said they fully support public education, but they didn't feel their kids were getting what they needed from their local middle school.
Oscar remembered getting a call from their local school one day saying his daughter needed to speak with the police. "And I am like, 'Excuse me?'"
"She had witnessed something at the school," Adam added, "so they were calling to tell us the police were about to question her."
The Kaiz-Veras said their daughter also needs extra learning support at school, but her teachers were often too busy managing distracting behavior from other students to help her.
Several families told NPR similar stories, as did district data. Last school year, the district recorded nearly 4,000 incidents that led to a suspension or expulsion. That's a lot of disruption, considering this punishment is meant to be reserved for the most severe behavior. When asked about the data, the district said it is more accurately recording incidents that might not have been recorded in previous years, and that, after COVID, it saw a rise in disruptive behavior.
Adam Kaiz-Vera said he still believes in the mission of public schools. "I believe in the greater good, but my kids have to come first." Academically and socially, he said, all three are doing well and thriving at Prep.
The Kaiz-Veras are now committed to the charter school – so much so that they weren't swayed after a story broke about Principal Justin Blietz: In March, Blietz was arrested and charged with harassment for verbally threatening a woman. He pleaded not guilty. The school fired him in early April and appointed an interim principal.
Blietz did not respond to a request for comment.
Now, the school is feeling some of the same competitive pressure its public school neighbors have been feeling – because, in Cedar Rapids' new, competitive marketplace, its product has gone from shiny and new to questionable and perhaps tainted.
Adam Kaiz-Vera said, as shocked as he was by the news, "We remain on board."
Private schools are also attracting public school families
Xavier High School, part of the Xavier Catholic school system, sits on a beautiful, sprawling campus on Cedar Rapids' north side. Its hallways are lined with full-to-the-brim trophy cases, and, on the second floor, sits a beautiful, stained-glass chapel that can host about a hundred students beneath its high, arched ceiling.
"They shouldn't be getting faith development just in theology," said Chris McCarville, president of the Xavier school system. "It should be part of the science curriculum. It should be part of the math curriculum. It should be part of football. It should be part of everything that we do."
Xavier's network includes seven private elementary and middle schools, all in and around Cedar Rapids. Next school year, local Catholic families will pay between $9,000 and $10,000 a year. Families who don't attend local Catholic churches will pay a little more.
Until recently, tuition was high enough to put Xavier out of reach for many in Cedar Rapids. That started to change in 2023, when Iowa Republicans created the Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), through which any Iowa child can get about $8,000 from the state to help pay for private school tuition. McCarville remembered it as "a really happy day."
This school year, McCarville said, 98% of Xavier families are using an ESA, including many who were there, able and willing to pay tuition, before the program began.
According to one estimate, more than half of students using Iowa's program were already attending a private school – a big reason the ESA program is costing the state more than $300 million this year.
"That is dumb," said Rob Sand, Iowa's state auditor and a rare Democrat elected to statewide office.
"We're not making a difference," he explained. "We are literally wasting money when we give it to people to do a thing that they would be doing anyways."
This phenomenon of states paying the tuition of children whose parents were already willing to pay is common in the early years of voucher programs – it happened in Arkansas, Arizona and Indiana.
But the ESAs have also put private schools within reach for some families.
"I think, for me to make the change, that ESA was necessary," said Stephanie King.
A few years ago, King, who is not Catholic, sent her youngest to public school and bristled at the fact that many of her neighbors were using private schools.
"You don't send your kids to public school? That's so awful," she remembers thinking. "But there was a reason."
The same reason King ended up enrolling her daughter at a Xavier school last fall: Their local public school was distracting, she said, with too much fighting and yelling. And the new ESA program had finally made Xavier's cost affordable.
King knows the public schools are struggling and that her departure will only worsen those struggles, at least in the short-term. But she echoes the Kaiz-Veras in her reasoning.
"I feel like I'm doing my duty. My duty is to pay my taxes, which I do," King said. "And if I am able to take some of the money that I have paid in to educate my child to a place where I feel like my kid's getting a better education, I think that's OK."
It's unclear how many families, like King's, have used an ESA to leave the public schools. In Cedar Rapids, data shows about 2,300 children are using them, but many of those were never in a public school to begin with.
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Not every family can choose to attend Xavier
The data suggests that Xavier's schools may still be out of reach for the city's poorest families: Of Xavier's more than 2,500 students, 13% are low-income – compared to 57% in the public schools.
Part of the problem is that Iowa's private schools have been raising their prices, according to research out of Princeton University. A new, unpublished update, which researchers shared with NPR, found that, by the program's third year, ESAs had led to a roughly 40% increase in tuition. Which means, for some, that $8,000 state voucher may not cover the full cost of attendance.
"We have increased tuition," McCarville acknowledged. "Our rationale, and it's the truth: We're trying to get to the actual cost to educate a child."
Cost isn't the only barrier for some students. Private schools, by law, have considerable say over who they accept. Unlike public schools or Cedar Rapids Prep, the city's private schools can turn away a child for poor grades, or a history of misbehavior. They can also reject a child with a disability by saying they don't have the resources it would require, which means, for some disabled students, it's the schools doing the choosing, not families.
McCarville said he's been trying to make Xavier more welcoming for kids with disabilities but that special education can be incredibly expensive.
"Oftentimes for us, what it comes down to is can we serve your child adequately?" McCarville said. "And sometimes, unfortunately, the answer is no."
The share of students with a special education plan, known as an I.E.P., is more than four times higher in the city's public schools than it is in Xavier's schools. With competition from these choice programs, Cedar Rapids' public schools aren't just losing students who can leave, they're becoming a refuge for those who can't.
Despite that, McCarville said private schools, like public schools, do serve the common good.
"How are our schools not for the common good?" McCarville asked. "If, again, our schools serve families that have a desire to have faith be an extension of what they get at home, what they get at their parish, and our kids go out into the world and do amazing things, how and why is that any different than a public school?"
Life at Cleveland Elementary
Principal Condra Allred doesn't just run Cleveland Elementary – she and her school also house a districtwide program for students with disabilities.
Walking through the school's old library, roughly subdivided by metal shelving into smaller areas, she greeted a student with autism as the child walked in a circle with an adult, enjoying a sensory break.
"That's our sensory area – makeshift in our library," Allred said. "Newer schools probably have a space for that, but we've made it work."
Children with disabilities have federally-protected rights to special education in public schools – but not in private schools. Allred said she's seen her competitors either reject a disabled student outright or admit them, only to push them out when they become too much work.
"We've had two or three incidents where students start in another choice school in the city. I'm not going to name names, but, within weeks, they're back at our school."
Still, Allred said, in recent years, she's gone from more than 300 students to about 250 – another reason Cleveland is on the chopping block. She worries that school choice is dividing families into those who have the time, money and know-how to seek other options and those who don't.
NPR spoke with a number of parents who could leave but don't want to. They love Cleveland, the staff and everything the school has stood for the past 76 years.
"One of the reasons why I bought my home where I did is because of Cleveland," said parent Antoine Jones, who has three kids at the school and said he's not going anywhere. "It's very sad. Because I just think schools are the backbone of a community and not only do I fear what will happen to my investment that I made into the community, I just fear what might happen to the community as a whole."
When told that some parents are leaving the city's schools because of safety concerns, Jones pushed back. Jones, who is Black, grew up in Chicago and remembers moving to a suburban neighborhood in middle school and watching white families move out:
"It's not for me to say what's right or what's wrong, but a lot of the time, like, they'll say safety just because they don't want to say what it really is: 'I don't feel comfortable with my kids going there with those kids.'"
The share of white students in the district has dropped considerably over the past decade, in large part because of open enrollment, which allowed families to switch to suburban districts. Meanwhile the share of students with disabilities and kids living in poverty has increased in city schools.
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"It's getting harder and harder to teach in public education," said Allred, who grew emotional talking about the shifting demographics and the pressure they put on public schools.
Soon, Allred expects to hear for certain if Cleveland is going to be closed.
"Someone needs to love and care for these kids that nobody cares about. And it's not that the parents don't care. They don't have the access and know the federal laws to get them somewhere. And even if they did, they might be denied."
In a free market, that can happen. But school choice also helped the Kaiz-Veras and Stephanie King move their children into schools where they are happier and doing better.
The question that school choice communities must now consider is whether a growing education marketplace can be made to work for everyone – even the most vulnerable children.
Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Additional research/guidance by: James Kelly and Grace King
Data analysis and graphics by: Rahul Mukherjee
Fact-checked by: Will Chase and Nicole Cohen
Audio story produced by: Justine Yan and Lauren Migaki
Audio story edited by: Jenny Schmidt and Nicole Cohen
Copyright 2026 NPR
