For effectively over a century, the public-school system in Florida has efficiently ready tens of millions of scholars for post-secondary schooling, entry stage jobs, navy careers, skilled careers, and maturity. This nice establishment is a cornerstone for our democracy and the doorway of alternative for each baby and household. Nonetheless, I’ve grown more-and-more involved for the way forward for our public faculties as a warfare is being waged towards it on two fronts.
On the primary entrance, public faculty {dollars} are being syphoned away and used to develop wealth and energy for choose people and personal pursuits.
Over the previous three years alone, laws has been handed increasing personal faculty vouchers throughout the state at an alarming fee. Information launched lately by the Florida Division of Schooling confirms that the voucher program has now enrolled over 165,000 college students who attend personal faculties all through the State of Florida costing taxpayers $1.5 billion.
In Leon County alone, that equates to roughly 2,000 college students at a value of over $16 million. Florida’s voucher program is now the fifth largest faculty district in all the state.
On a second entrance, some elected leaders are waging a detrimental propaganda warfare towards our public-school system that’s merely unfaithful.
The governor is main the cost through the use of his political platform to create a divisive, confrontational, and false narrative concerning the precise happenings in our faculties on the expense of college board members, faculty directors, and worst of all, our academics.
That is being completed to drive college students and households away by casting doubt, creating worry, and inserting a wedge between mother and father and our public faculties based mostly upon a false rhetoric.
Time and time once more, the governor has gone on report with unsubstantiated tales about what faculties are selling and what academics are educating in school rooms that has not been backed up with any supporting proof.
Make no mistake about it, the aspersions directed at public faculties is accelerating the speed by which the state schooling system turns into utterly privatized. Over a billion {dollars}, which in any other case would go to public faculties, are actually being siphoned off to personal faculties, to do no matter they need with zero accountability for scholar achievement, instructor and administrator certification necessities, or faculty grades.
Let’s be clear, this isn’t nearly cash — it’s concerning the sanctity of an establishment that has benefited our society past measure. It’s concerning the alternative for each baby to realize a free public schooling.
John F. Kennedy as soon as stated, “the longer term promise of any nation will be immediately measured by the current prospects of its youth.” After we create two separate faculty techniques, one for the privileged and one for everybody else, we marginalize much more college students with disabilities and people who reside in poverty.
At this pivotal second in Florida’s schooling system, what can we do? The way in which I see it, we now have two decisions. One, we keep silent and permit the privatization of the public-school system to proceed so the rich change into wealthier, our faculties change into extra segregated, and the beliefs that the public-school system represents is totally denigrated; Or we come collectively, push again, and communicate up towards the dismantling of the public-school system.
I’m a product of Leon County Colleges, have labored in our college system for 35 years, and now proudly function superintendent. I can’t stand by and watch one thing I deeply look after be torn aside by those that are simply hungry for energy and political achieve.
Please be a part of me by voting for people who assist our public faculties and by contacting our present elected officers in state authorities and letting them know that you simply additionally stand for the sanctity of our public-school system and all it has completed over the past three centuries to coach, uplift, and assist all our kids, giving them an equal alternative for a profitable future.
Rocky Hanna is superintendent of Leon County Colleges.
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