HOW can courts or school districts charge parents with a crime, who are desperate to find a good school for their kids?  Well, they’re doing it, and it’s a crime wave.  In states like Ohio,  Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri  concerned parents are being arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.

This is truly a miscarriage of justice.  The guilty parties are school district employees and school board members who are truly responsible for permitting our school systems to decline, if not completely fail.  The Wall Street Journal has a remarkable piece on the issue today.

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.   Ohio Governor John Kasich gave the woman a break and reduced the crimes to misdemeanors so that her previously spotless record would not hold her back from becoming a teacher herself.

For many parents, and especially single parents like Ms. Williams-Bolar,  good schools often are the only hope their kids have for a better life.  If they use a phony address or try to acquire a “work permit” in another school district offering better opportunities, it’s not because they want to leave their own communities, it is because their neighborhood schools are so embarrassingly bad, they can’t bear to leave their kids there.

The underlying virus that is infecting our schools?  Teachers Unions.  Our school board seats are bought by the powerful unions and filled with boardmembers who will continue to protect their salary and benefit demands.   Teachers unions are still fighting to hang onto health and retirement benefits that have evaporated elsewhere.  The cost of these benefits is literally reducing supply budgets in our schools and limiting teachers in their classrooms.   Even more egregious,  teachers unions prevent neighborhood school principals from being able to fire teachers who aren’t doing their jobs.    The combination of these protections and benefit demands are turning our public schools into hurting, uninspired campuses with little hope or direction.   NO WONDER PARENTS ARE LOOKING AROUND.

FREE and pardon any parent caught for trying to do the right thing for their child.  It is their right.  Who can blame them?  And why should they be the ones on trial?  Let’s put our school district officials on trial and our school board members who freely take money from corrupt teachers union officials.

They’re the ones who are guilty of a crime.

 

 

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Filed under: Economy, Education, Featured, Inside The KC, Politics, Uncategorized by Sonja Eddings Brown, Oct 1, 2011