What Does It Mean When Hardly Anybody Stands Up for the Basic Needs of Children and Public Schools?
Why has this blog kept on covering the Trump administration’s and U.S. Senate Republicans’ lack of willingness to negotiate a second COVID-19 stimulus bill including federal assistance to help public schools make accommodations to open safely this fall and to shore up the state budgets which provide an average of 40 percent of K-12 public school funding across the United States?
The answer is simple and for me it is very sad. I do not remember a time when the wellbeing of children has been so totally forgotten by the leaders of the political party in power in the White House and the Congress. This fall, school district leaders have been left on their own as they try to serve and educate children while the COVID-19 pandemic continues raging across the states. School leaders are trying to hold it all together this fall at the same time their state budgets in some places have already been cut.
In Ohio, the COVID-19 recession is only exacerbating a public school fiscal crisis driven by a long history of inequitable school funding and the expansion of school privatization. On November 3, the school district where I live has been forced to put a local operating levy on the ballot simply to avert catastrophe. EdChoice vouchers, funded by a “local school district deduction” extract $6,000 for each high school voucher student and $4,650 for each K-8 voucher student right out of our school district’s budget. Although these students attend private and religious schools, the state counts voucher students as part of our per-pupil enrollment, which means that the state pays the district some of the cost of the voucher. In a normal year, there is a net loss because the vouchers are worth more than our district’s state basic aid, but this year the loss is even worse: In he current state budget, the Legislature froze the state’s contribution to the state’s school districts at the FY 2019 level. This means that the state is not allocating any additional funding to our school district to cover the new vouchers CONTINUE READING: What Does It Mean When Hardly Anybody Stands Up for the Basic Needs of Children and Public Schools? | janresseger
