Education Matters US

I’m sure that we all can agree that the overwhelming majority of parents want the best education they can get for their children. Because of this some parents will lie about where they live; some change living arrangements during the school year; some have boundary changes forced upon them; and some are forced to go to the Supreme Court. The circumstances in each of these stories are different. Let’s explore each scenario and you’ll soon see why they all end up with the same conclusion.

First, I understand the motivation for those who lie about where they live. However, they are still not doing what is right. They would be better off speaking up for change in the system instead. Here are a few excerpts from the article.

If true, the family could owe Plainfield School District $252,500 in tuition reimbursement, Godinez said. The district currently spends about $8,300 per student annually.

Currently, Plainfield School District has 25 schools, one pre-school and one alternative school with three new schools on the way this fall — meaning there could be at least 300 students attending Plainfield schools when they shouldn’t be, costing the taxpayers about $2.5 million.

A Joliet family who sent their two children to Plainfield schools for 2½ years agreed to pay the district $250 a month for seven years to fulfill their debt of $21,000 in out-of-school district tuition.

These cases are just a sampling of what is suspected to be about 10 kids per school in this district. The reporter in this story only tells the side of the school. It talks about the cost to the taxpayers as being the full $8300 per year. This number is technically correct, but not the entire story. The amount spent per student comes from property taxes, state aid and federal monies. The portion that the family should be charged is only the amount of property taxes. This is because the school has been counting these students and received their federal and state monies because the students attended their schools. The story doesn’t say whether the school will be returning this money to the state or federal government, but I would venture to say they won’t. While they are claiming that the taxpayers are being robbed, they are in effect doing the very same thing by getting double money for these children, minus the property tax difference of course.

With the family of seven, Thorse said the district is looking into asking the Will County State’s Attorney office to press charges against the parents and perhaps the grandparents.

Not only will they go after the double money, they want criminal charges brought against some of the families.

“We just don’t go away. It’s not right to the taxpayers,” Thorse said. “We will file criminal charges against parents who knowingly violated the residency. I think there are some people who don’t know. I think there are some situations where people are naive and think they can go to any school they want and anywhere they want.”

I highlighted the last quote because of the irony. This school administrator is telling parents they don’t have the right to send there children to whatever school they want. He is defending a government run monopoly. The irony of this quote is that in America, the freest nation on earth, children are subjected to a closed system that prevents many parents the freedom to send their child to the best school they can find.

The second situation is a mother who started the year living with her mother and is ending the year back with her husband, of course in separate school districts. The children however were reportedly living with the grandmother, although this is disputed by the school district.

This has been a tough year for Dana Wekesa, a 28-year-old nurse’s aide from Kenosha. While trying to balance a job, college and a rocky marriage, her mother in Zion has helped care for her children since 2000.

Now, with only six weeks of school left, her two school-aged children are not allowed to attend Newport Elementary School in Wadsworth anymore because Beach Park School District officials determined they don’t live within district boundaries. They also slapped Wekesa with a bill for $9,156, because non-resident students have to pay $43 per day.

Wekesa argues that her children — a kindergartner and third-grader — have residency because they sleep at her mother’s house within the district.

“They stay there four to five days a week and two or three weekends out of the month,” Wekesa said.

The changing circumstances in this mothers’ life is causing another problem for herself and her children. Again this situation arises because our government school monopoly is a closed system that doesn’t allow for freedom for changes in life. It restricts education while claiming it must educate everyone. This too leads directly to the money and how schools are funded.

Boundary changes within schools districts are almost always contentious. This is the case again in the third type of students, those that find themselves forced to change schools.

“I’m an advocate for school choice, but you can’t have that in the 15 minutes before school starts,” Schlomann said.

At its June 25, the school board discussed the possibility of allowing the 44 students to choose whether to remain at St. Charles North High School or attend St. Charles East. Under boundaries that the board approved in December, the 44 eighth-graders were to be sent to St. Charles East.

“A child may grow up in a certain neighborhood, attending certain football games, having visions of where they would go to school,” Schlomann said. “Those kinds of aspects are a part of the psyche of our community.”

Public school districts have the ultimate authority to choose which school a child attends based on not only on their zip code, but down to which house on which street you live. I am not sure how this superintendent defines school choice, but his actions here speak much louder than his words. He is defending the government school monopoly against the will of the parents and students choice.

Lastly, the story of this single mom will have national ramifications. She is one of the mothers who fought race only preferences in school assignments that lead to the Supreme Court ruling banning the practice. [Emphasis mine]

“We’re here not because we didn’t get our first choice, but because we didn’t get any choice,” Meredith said after the ruling.

He offered her a chance to sign on to the suit and charged her $1 for a fee. At trial, Meredith said the plan violated her rights by denying her son equal access to schools.

Meredith said she would take on the fight again, if it meant getting her son into a good school.

”My son is my world, and I will never quit fighting for his rights,” Meredith said. ”I hope my son looks back and knows I will stop at nothing to do what’s best for him.”

I know this decision has led to much despair and hand wringing among the liberals and the government school monopoly proponents. I side with the Supreme Court on this ruling. We are supposed to be a color blind society now and yet we still have to bow to preferences based solely on race. I am glad to see that ending and giving the country the opportunity to move on to becoming a color blind society in all aspects of our lives.

The aspect of this case that is more poignant than the race issue is the issue of “equal access to schools”. The way our current schools are setup deny many children equal access to a good education. As seen in the above examples they do this by district boundaries, internal school attendance boundaries, and racial delineation. Many within the government school bureaucracy would argue that to provide equal access only requires more money. It has been proven that money is not the answer to improving educational quality. Therefore, it will not be the answer to providing equal access to all children.

As I stated above, all of these cases lead to one conclusion for solving he problem. That solution is to fund the child and not the bureaucracy. This simple plan that would allow all children equal access to a good education would put parents back in charge of their children’s education. This can easily be done with the following steps:

• Designate an equal amount of money for each school-aged child
• The parents then choose which school their child will attend
  • Public – in or out of current district boundary
  • Private
  • Charter
• Remove all current mandates
• Require all financial data to be on the internet for all public/charter schools
• Require yearly testing of all students – all schools (These tests should be created by an independent authority and not the current State or Education Bureaucracy)
• Require raw and aggregate testing results to be on the internet in a timely manner, i.e. in time for school selection for the upcoming school year – all schools
• Abolish NCLB, it will no longer be needed
• Abolish the Dept. of Education, it also will no longer be needed