I've mentioned several times about the NC Republican GA robbing the public school funds to help fund their private-voucher funded school system. The Republicans, for the past few years (since gaining control in 2010) have said the public school system was failing the students and that money (coming from the NC Educational Lottery started in 2004) was being wasted when it would be better to provide children/parents the option of attending the private schools around the state. Well, the latest Republican scam is now OUT ...
what the Republicans really wanted was a way to fund their state tax cuts for the corporations & wealthiest citizens at the expense of the public school system of North Carolina. Here's how they are doing it:
Two years ago Republicans took over $800,000 of public school system money and used it to kick off their voucher funded-private schools idea. Their explanation was that the poorer ******* (inner city) could now have a higher quality of education and up to half of their private schools tuitions paid by vouchers. This still left parents of these poorest children having to shoulder up to $6-10,000 per baby to go to a private school. It also meant parents would have to provide their own transportation (no buses) and the total costs of uniforms. So, how did all that work out ...
* As of the 2018-2019 school year < 60% of the funds earmarked for the voucher program have been used. Poor ******* could not afford the added expenses of proportionally shared dues, uniforms, or transportation.
* There is a big shortage of private schools located near the locations of inner city children. Of course Republicans knew this.
The Republicans knew (obviously) that a lot of the funds held for the private schools/voucher program could possibly go unused, thus
they wrote into the program that any moneys NOT used after two years would then be deposited into the state's "general funds" to be used at the state's discretion. You would think, since they robbed the public schools of much needed funds from the Educational Lottery (which Republicans fought to stop from initializing in 2004), that they would redeposit the funds back to the public schools for teacher pay increases since NC teacher pay is in the bottom 10 states of the US) and re-establish the teachers assistants positions they eliminated 3 years ago.
But NOOOO, the Republicans plan to use this "windfall" of money to, guess what???) ..... yeah, MORE income tax cuts in the state. So they basically robbed the POOREST to pay the RICHEST in North Carolina.
Also, interesting, is that the qualifications to BE a private school teacher is far less than that of public school teachers, who are often accredited by their 4th-5th year of teaching in a public school. In fact, a private school teacher doesn't even have to have a college degree for teaching.
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