Dr. Sharon Harris-Ewing
As a former trainer educator and college board member, I’m a sturdy advocate for public faculties. Since shifting to Naples in 2016, I’ve realized that Floridians maintain extensively divergent views about public education. These variations matter.
I consider public faculties are a public good. They exist to teach the citizenry of at the moment and tomorrow by educating the rules on which our nation was based and our future relies upon. Students of totally different backgrounds, religions, languages, and worldviews taught by competent and caring academics are inspired to simply accept each other, study from one another, and work collectively. They study to suppose critically, to downside resolve, and to worth the ways in which individuals are totally different in addition to the methods we’re alike. They purchase the abilities to grow to be efficient staff and accountable residents.
Public faculties serve your entire group. Although my youngsters are now not school-aged, I proceed to advocate for elevated funding for public faculties so they’ll have the sources obligatory to satisfy their mission. As public entities, supported by public funds, public faculties are ruled by representatives elected to native boards of education. Parents and group members immediately have an effect on what occurs in public faculties: first, by voting for board members to signify them; second, by speaking with those that are elected.
In distinction, some individuals consider public education is finest performed via distribution of public monies to oldsters to make use of to ship their youngsters to the faculties of their alternative. This development is most evident within the billions of {dollars} allotted to vouchers in Florida lately—scholarship funds which have helped mother and father ship their youngsters wherever they need. This cash goes to non-public and non secular faculties that aren’t accountable to the public; not ruled by state rules associated to trainer certification, curriculum, or assessments; and never topic to anti-discrimination legal guidelines that defend minorities, LGBTQ college students, and college students with particular wants, to call a few.
Whether assist for vouchers is a view held by a majority or simply a loud, influential minority is unclear. Either means, its defenders have efficiently persuaded the State Legislature to repeatedly improve public funding of voucher packages, together with cash for non secular faculties—arguably opposite to constitutional separation of church and state. Without query, rising the funding that helps personal and non secular faculties makes much less cash accessible to assist public education.
I write now with the hope of alerting others to those competing views and to the truth that the voucher proponents look like profitable, to the detriment of Florida’s public faculties. If you consider that wonderful public faculties are important and profit your entire group, and that public funds ought to assist public faculties and never personal or non secular faculties, please get entangled now. Advocate for public education.
More particularly, take note of the School Board races in August. In Collier County three of 5 seats are up for election. Research the candidates. Identify the three who will signify your values, work to maintain what’s already wonderful, and enhance what must be made higher. If you’ll be away in August, ask in your vote-by-mail poll now. Usually, the winners are decided in that major election; provided that no candidate receives 50% in a specific race will that contest be determined in November.
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