An open letter to Patty Murray on the ESEA rewrite: We need funding, NOT charter schools.
Dear Senator Patty Murray,
I saw on Twitter that you got into politics because of school funding cuts.
Your tweet explains how after going to Olympia, you were dismissed by a state legislator because you just didn’t seem important. Instead of giving up, you went home and organized.
“He dismissed me because I didn’t look like what they thought everybody important should look like. So, I drove home and started calling all the other moms, and they called the moms they knew – all were mad – and we were back at the State Legislature.” The resulting grassroots campaign restored the cuts.
This year I’ve had a similar experience.
One month into the school year, both of my kids’ schools were faced with devastating staff cuts. Instead of getting on the phone – like you did – I took to Facebook and connected with other moms who were angry about their schools losing staff.
Together we organized a Half-Baked Bake Sale on the lawn of district headquarters to highlight the absurdity of trying to fund education – and offset staff cuts – with carwashes and bake sales.
This month, right after the district pleaded no money to save school staff, the school board decided to give our Superintendent a raise. As you can imagine, this move really upset parents.
This lead to the Thirteen Thousand Dollar Question, where my new activist friends and I, asked parents across the district what problems their schools could solve with the Superintendent’s proposed raise.
Through this action, we learned how desperately underfunded our public schools really An open letter to Patty Murray on the ESEA rewrite: We need funding, NOT charter schools. | Seattle Education:
