ARLINGTON, Va.—Today, the Partnership for Educational Choice, a joint project of the Institute for Justice (IJ) and EdChoice, announced it has filed a motion to intervene in federal court on behalf of Arkansas parents seeking to defend the state’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) program. The motion comes in response to a new lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas that seeks to halt the program’s implementation.
This is the second legal challenge to Arkansas’s EFA program. A similar case was filed in state court in 2024, and the Partnership for Educational Choice is already representing families in that case. Those same families are now seeking to intervene in the latest challenge in federal court. They include Erika Lara, Katie Parrish, and Nikita Glendenning, all Arkansas mothers whose children use the program.
“This new lawsuit does nothing more than repackage old arguments that courts across the country have consistently rejected,” said Thomas M. Fisher, Executive Vice President and Director of Litigation at EdChoice Legal Advocates, EdChoice’s legal arm. “Arkansas’s EFA program is constitutional, it does not harm public education, and it gives families– especially those in need–real options to meet their children’s educational needs.”
The Children’s Educational Freedom Account Program was created as part of the LEARNS Act in 2023. It allows eligible families to access flexible accounts valued at approximately $7,000 to pay for private school tuition, therapies, curriculum, and other qualified educational expenses.
Nikita Glendenning is a homeschooling mother of four in Van Buren, Arkansas, who has used a combination of public, private, and home education to meet her children’s individual needs and is currently using Arkansas’s Educational Freedom Accounts to support personalized learning for her two youngest children. Katie Parrish is a public charter-school teacher and mother of a son with autism and ADHD who is thriving at a specialized microschool thanks to the state’s Educational Freedom Account program, which helps her family afford the education and support he needs. Erika Lara is a single mother whose son with autism was bullied and fell behind in public school but is now thriving academically and emotionally at a private school, thanks to the program.
The Partnership for Educational Choice is asking the court to allow the mothers to formally join the case and defend the EFA Program’s constitutionality. EdChoice will take the lead on this federal case, while IJ will continue to serve as the lead in the state court case.
“Parents have a constitutional right to pick the education that best fits their children’s needs, and the Education Freedom Account program empowers them to exercise that right,” said IJ Attorney Joe Gay. “This new lawsuit is just the latest attempt by opponents of educational freedom to strip thousands of parents of the ability to direct their children’s education, and to take desperately needed opportunity away from thousands of Arkansas students.”