Each morning for roughly nine months of the year in this deeply red state, the overwhelming majority of parents make the trek to a public school to drop off their kids for the day.
Almost all of those parents love that school. They respect their kids’ teachers. They have a decent enough relationship with the school administration.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, of course, and problems exist at most schools, like with literally every entity that services a large portion of the public, but on the whole, the people like their local public schools and the people who make them go.
Which is why it remains consistently astounding that so many people in this state sit idly by as those same schools they love are attacked, defunded and hamstrung by a group of elitists who want their tax dollars to subsidize their kids’ private school tuitions.
That’s the accurate summation of Alabama’s CHOOSE Act, and all similar voucher programs that reroute public school tax dollars from public schools to for-profit businesses that are not required to adhere to the same rigorous standards or the same public scrutiny. Those funds – up to $7,000 per student in Alabama – are stripped from the public school classrooms and will instead be used by families whose kids are almost certainly already enrolled in a private school.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced this week that this year’s enrollment period for this scam was opening. We’re now using up to $180 million of education dollars annually to pay for these kids to use a private park.
That’s basically what this is, if you truly consider the absurdity of it all. It’s like a bunch of rich people who think the publicly-funded local park isn’t good enough for them so they demand you subsidize their membership fees at a private facility. Your Republican lawmakers went along with it.
And it will never stop unless the people push back.
We’ve already expanded the cost of this thing from $100 million annually to $180 million annually. Next year, the cap is set to be removed completely, meaning every family in the state currently enrolling their kids in private schools will be handed $7,000. The total is projected to exceed more than a half-billion dollars.
Which is why they had to kill the overtime tax repeal. Something quite poetic about the enrollment period for this monstrosity opening the same week that the OT tax repeal dies. But then, when combined with the CHOOSE Act, the tax repeal, which removed the state’s 5-percent tax on overtime pay, was just too much for the budget to bear. One of them had to go.
And when choosing between the working class and the elites, guess which ones our lawmakers went with.
But then, they’re following the lead from the top. The president’s marquee spending takes roughly $5 billion from public schools across the country and reallocates it to voucher-like programs.
Our senators and our Republican congressional delegation voted for this. Voted to take money away from those public schools you love, to defund the classrooms and teachers that prepare your children for the world.
But I guess those private school kids are worth more than your kid.
Wait, no, I don’t think that. You think that.
You must believe that to be true, because otherwise you’d be standing up to this insanity, demanding that lawmakers stop stealing from our public schools. Or at the very least, demand that if they’re going to steal the money from public schools that the private schools that get our hard-earned tax dollars be held to the same standards and receive the same scrutiny.
But then, maybe you don’t believe your kids deserve it.
