Many Valley families can’t afford ‘school choice’

Sending your children to private school is the ultimate in school choice. We already have educational choices in spades in the Mat-Su Valley.

As much as anything, the discussion of school choice boils down to questions of personal economics and fairness.

If you can afford to choose a school other than your neighborhood public elementary, middle or high school for your student, you have a degree of school choice that is increasingly unavailable to many local families.

Families that can afford to choose charter schools or private schools for their children should also realize that they already have vastly more education options than their economically disadvantaged neighbors who are living hand to mouth.

This conversation about education options is ultimately tied to finite public dollars. While “the haves” clamor for vouchers, for more school choice, the least among us lack the wherewithal to engage in even the more tailored in-district options available, such as charter schools, which may require the investment of volunteer hours or require students to have private transportation to school.

That all people in the United States have the opportunity to learn to read and write, to learn job skills and pursue higher learning, is a notion that helped build this country into the greatest nation on Earth.

Increasingly, though, we see the public education system in our country under attack. Parents who say they shouldn’t have to pay to send their children to private school and pay for the public education system they aren’t using have launched many of these onslaughts nationally.

Now members from these same social strata are coming hands-out to the Legislature asking for public money to support the private — mostly religious — school choices they’ve already made.

As written, our state constitution prohibits this practice.

“The Legislature shall by general law establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the state, and may provide for other public educational institutions. Schools and institutions so established shall be free from sectarian control. No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution,” according to Article VII Section 1 of the Alaska Constitution.

To get around that, Wasilla Rep. Wes Keller has introduced an amendment to the Alaska Constitution that would OK the transfer of public money to religious schools.

Keller introduced the same resolution last year, but it died in committee. To pass the Legislature this year, Keller’s bill needs to win two-thirds of the votes in the House and Senate. If approved, it would appear on the 2014 ballot for voters to review.

We’re not saying private schools are bad or that they are only for the ultra-rich. We are saying if you need free or reduced-price school lunches, are homeless or work retail or service jobs and live paycheck to paycheck — like many families in our Valley — you can’t even afford the school choices already offered. Reasons are more rudimentary than tuition — such as a lack transportation, the need for school lunches or the reality of working two or three low-wage jobs to make ends meet and lacking the time necessary to volunteer in your children’s classrooms as required at charter schools.

Our public education system has paved the way forward for countless Americans to move out of poverty. But these days, that success against high odds story of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps depends on the leveling of the playing field public education provides.