It has been a long time since school routines, calendars, activities, and issues registered with me—certainly since my own days in the long-gone Fayetteville City Schools or my children’s years in the Cumberland County School System. What I do remember, though, is what all those years in local schools meant to us as individuals and as a family in terms of educational quality, socialization, safety, and caring.
They meant the world—and still do in the lives of the now grown Dicksons.
Which is why what has happened to our state’s public schools for almost two decades is heartbreaking to millions of North Carolinians. It has been a long, step by painful step journey to the educational bottom.
The most recent and ongoing outrage is the transfer of our tax dollars, yours and mine, away from public schools to private institutions, many of them religious. An innocuous-sounding voucher system called Opportunity Scholarships is available to all North Carolina families whether they have incomes of $50K or $500K. The General Assembly budgeted $432M in tax dollars that came from my pocketbook and yours to move public funds into private hands. Our most populous counties, Mecklenburg and Wake, received the most, of course, with more than $39M and almost $51M, respectively. Cumberland received more than $23M for 3850 students’ tuition to private schools. Smaller, more rural counties receive far less and sometimes no voucher money, because they have fewer private schools and some have none at all.
Those millions are tax dollars that without such vouchers would likely have gone into North Carolina’s public schools.
But if that is not enough to make your blood boil, process this.
Of the students who received a tuition for private school, more than 90-percent of them—yes, you read that correctly, more than 90-percent, were already in private schools! In other words, their families were already paying tuition, so the state---that would be you and I—just gave them a freebie on their tuition bills. For the school years that just ended, it was a $432M break. Hardly chump change and to no one’s great surprise, many of these private schools raised their tuition this year, an average of 15-percent, far above inflation level.
While vouchers are a very hard hit to public education, state neglect of public education has been ongoing for years. David Rice, executive director of Public Education Works, wrote recently that the North Carolina General Assembly no longer cares about public education and, what’s more, does not care what we taxpayers think about that. Wrote Rice, legislators “don’t care that a judge ordered them decades ago to do right by schools in funding.
They don’t care how it looks for them to lavish more than half-a billion dollars on private school vouchers, even for well-off-families, as public schools begin to wither on the vine.”
“They don’t care that North Carolina now ranks 43rd in the nation for average teacher pay, down five spots from the previous year,…behind Georgia (23), Alabama (33), South Carolina (36), Tennessee (38), and Kentucky (42)."
Rice goes on to make the case that not only do legislators not care about public education. Apparently neither do we taxpayers, the supposed adults in the room. Given the fact that about 80-percent of school age North Carolinians attend public school, this is a dangerous and shortsighted approach.
Rice supports public education for the same reasons I and many other concerned North Carolinians do, even people who do not have school age children.
“They help promote economic development and job growth by enriching the quality of the labor pool.
“They attract new residents. They help lift children out of poverty and keep them away from crime. And they enrich the cultural fabric of their communities.”
Maybe we all agree with a certain First Lady who visited migrant children wearing a jacket emblazoned with, “I really don’t care Do you”