CONFERENCE BRINGS TOGETHER NATION'S LEADERS IN SCHOOL-VOUCHER EFFORT

Where the battle for school choice is concerned, all eyes this fall will be up north on America's Water Wonderland.

A few days after the May 12 conclusion of this year's legislative session, I made a 36-hour trip to Grand Rapids, Mich., to attend the national CEO America Founders Conference. CEO America stands for Children's Educational Opportunity America, which is headquartered in Bentonville, Ark. Why Bentonville? A good guess is that a primary financial angel of CEO America is Wal-Mart heir John Walton, among whose gifts is $50 million for this purpose, equally matched by New York financier and industrialist Ted Forstmann.

CEO America may be described as a loose confederation of local efforts to raise money for privately funded K-12 scholarships vouchers to help poor (and overwhelmingly minority) children escape the desperately bad, inner-city public schools in which government has trapped them. This annual Founders' Conference is the nearest thing to a national school choice summit that occurs in this country today. The Rev. Carl Herbster, a Baptist minister from Kansas City, and I were the only attendees from Missouri.

Convened and hosted by Dick and Betsey DeVos of Amway Corp. fame, the conference was a day-long affair packed with state- and national-level leaders of the movement to extend freedom to parents to choose any school, public or private. From humble beginnings a decade and more ago in San Antonio and Indianapolis, CEO America now is up and running with Hope Scholarships in dozens of cities from coast to coast. These include fledgling efforts in St. Louis and Kansas City home, as observed here before, to two of America's worst urban school systems. It is as inspiring a movement as this writer has ever seen.

I introduced myself to New York financier Peter Flanigan, a hero of CEO America and the school choice movement. We discussed two recent seven-figure donations from St. Louis philanthropists, including a $1 million gift from former May Co. chairman David Farrell. I mentioned former local radio station owner and ace political consultant Al Sikes, a Sikeston native who went on to chair the Federal Communications Commission during the Bush administration. At this Flanigan brightened and said, "Al's doing a great job chairing our effort in New York City" where he's now a top media executive with Hearst Corp.

The DeVoses are the prime movers behind the effort to pass a school-choice initiative Michigan voters will see on this November's statewide ballot. To get to know the DeVoses is to become admirers of their selfless and principled stand on this, as on other issues. So ardent are the DeVoses in this cause that Betsey, who had served the Michigan Republican Party for several years as chairman of its state committee, resigned that post in a high-profile dispute with Michigan's Republican Gov. John Engler, over the governor's puzzling opposition to this year's ballot initiative. (Engler had long backed school choice.)

Eschewing partisanship, leaders of the effort to pass Michigan's historic school choice measure are reaching across all political, economic, social, religious and racial lines. It is uniting inner-city black Democrats with suburban and rural Republicans who want to expand your freedom to choose any school.

Next: Details of the Michigan plan, and the battle royal shaping up with teachers unions in one of America's most heavily unionized states.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.