GOP, Tea Party Influence Permeates Local Charter School
An original post for K12NN by LiberalMama (@liberalmama on Twitter).
Earlier this year, the city council in my community voted to close a heavily-used library branch. While the city was indeed dealing with a budget shortfall, the branch seemed a bargain with operational costs of around $200,000 per year. The city had $34 million in reserves and had recently sold an asset for $230,000. In addition, a group of private citizens raised half a year’s budget and would donate it to the library on the condition the branch be kept open a minimum of four years. However, the Republican-dominated council wasn’t interested in any of these solutions and insisted they had no other choice but to close the library in order to balance the budget (sound familiar?). Turns out they’d already been showing the city-owned property to a potential renter – a local charter school looking to expand.
As a regular patron of the library branch and a skeptic of the barely-regulated charter school system, I was alarmed when I learned of this. And as the parent of a preschooler who would be entering the educational system in the next few years, I’d been reading up on the so-called school “reform” movement. The more I learned, the