Message from NEF Chairman to State QZAB Directors re: QZAB Extension Bill
Dear State QZAB Director,
As you may know, the House eliminated all tax credit bonds including QZAB from the House Tax Reform Bill, in spite of us (NEF) facilitating bipartisan support and White House support for QZAB.
The Senate is finalizing its Tax Reform Bill this week. We have brought QZAB to the attention of key Senators. It will surely help if you can send the following message ASAP to senators, especially the Senate Finance Committee members, and also the House leaders. In addition, please ask ASAP all LEAs in your state, which received QZABs and pursuing QZABs to do the same:
“Please remove Section 3603 from the House Tax Reform bill so that it doesn’t strip away valuable tools like QZABs from LEAs (local school districts/schools). The amount of money saved by eliminating tax credit bonds like QZABs is very minimal, but the impact of removing these type of funding options for LEAs is enormous.”
The attached link will help you and the LEAs to identify your and their members of Congress, as well as their contact information.
https://contactingcongress.org/
- NEF and our academy partner SUNY (State University of New York) recently offered the White House and Congress our NEF-SUNY “STEM Vision for America” to provide world-class STEM education (including Smart City design contests) to one million students in 2018-19 and increasing the number annually, to help raise US from the bottom 12% globally to the top 20% in 4 years. 100,000 students were going to come from our QZAB STEM academies! The rest was going to come from $200 million Federal funds, and the 80%-100% NEF-SUNY STEM grants (www.stemgrant.org ).
We are proceeding with our STEM Vision for America, irrespective of what Congress does, because America can’t afford to export 8 million STEM jobs annually. QZAB inclusion in the final Tax Reform Bill will help our vision. Your support is appreciated.
Our kids need help! Thank you on behalf of the millions of students in our disadvantaged LEAs.