issue:
Schools
Our Need: Ensure that our schools are properly funded, and that tax money designated for our public schools goes to our public schools
Perspective
ONE—We can’t continue to short-shrift our children and our own success by taking money away from public schools, and that means from our kids. NC used to spend an average amount of money per child on education; with Neal Jackson in office, our state has pulled so much money away from education that we now rank dead last in the country on what we spend per child, less than half as much as top spenders. Now think of teacher's pay: just in the last year, NC public school teacher salaries dropped from an embarrassing 43rd in the US to 46th, and is the only state where teacher salaries are expected to DEcrease. How can we succeed with children continually being stunted by poor education?
TWO—Public tax money needs to go to public schools. Neal Jackson, the incumbent, sponsored the decision to take public money designated for public schools—$1.1 BILLION over 8 years—and re-direct it for private school vouchers, what they call "Opportunity scholarships". I'm not seeing where the "opportunity" is except to make private schools richer. Understand that the vouchers have no “guardrails”: the people who can already afford private school get vouchers which send money to those rich schools, while the rest of us don’t get enough from a school voucher to begin to pay for a private school, so who benefits there? Where's the opportunity? Our public schools get screwed, making the gap bigger. In fact, vouchers do NOT increase parental choice, just exacerbate the difference between the Haves and the HaveNots.
THREE—This voucher program Jackson loves is essentially creating state-sponsored religious schools and state-sanctioned discrimination with your tax dollars. To be clear: private schools do not have the same safeguards as public schools to prevent discrimination (by race, gender, learning disability, specific beliefs, any other “identity” they choose) nor preventing the promotion of a state-sponsored religion. Our country was founded on the separation of church and state, and as a practicing Christian, I have no problem with maintaining that separation. My God cares about our hearts, and about being loving toward all, which means not forcing anything down anyone's throats.
FOUR—Neal Jackson loves to crow about being a pastor of Beulah Church in Bennett, NC, and in fact his church's school benefits from this voucher program. I wonder by how much.