By Kathryn Hickok
This spring, the Children’s Scholarship Fund-Oregon program sponsored by Cascade Policy Institute is celebrating twenty years of giving low-income parents more choices in education through partial-tuition grade school scholarships.
The Children’s Scholarship Fund was founded by the late Ted Forstmann and John Walton, who donated $100 million together and partnered with scholarship organizations across the country, raising money from supporters in each community, to award the initial 40,000 scholarships in 1999. Here in Oregon, the parents of more than 6,600 children applied for the first 550 scholarships.
Over the last two decades, CSF and CSF partner program scholarship alumni have gone on to higher education or career training and are pursuing jobs in fields as diverse as business and finance, law, advertising, computer science, and the arts.
An Oregon scholarship recipient once said: “What [the Children’s Scholarship Fund has] given me is so much more than money; you have given me opportunity, confidence, faith, and trust that life has meaning, and that I am meant to succeed no matter what obstacles come my way.”
Our founders often said, “If you save one life, you save the world.” By offering parents the opportunity to choose which school best fits their child’s needs, the Children’s Scholarship Fund puts the power of education back in the hands of parents, where it belongs.
Kathryn Hickok is Executive Vice President at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. She is also director of Cascade’s Children’s Scholarship Fund-Oregon program, which provides partial tuition scholarships to Oregon elementary students from lower-income families.
Click here for the PDF version:
