On the first day of early voting, October 15, 2020, I had a talk with my Wake County school board member.
I walked up to her and said,
"I guess our families are always going to be fighting."
She said, "Angelaaaa, that's not nice." Newsflash. Angela is not a 5 year old and calling balls and strikes isn't mean. She needed to hear why families need alternatives to the system which she grows and protects.
Families need options so they can escape K-12 problems they view as unacceptable and irredeemable. It is this plain and simple. Your child is not property of any County School System, nor is she/he property of the state. As a child's parent and legal guardian, my husband and I are entrusted with finding a school which suits our child's needs.
Having our education tax dollars to do so would make this task a bit easier, but instead, those dollars do not benefit my child and are siphoned from our household budget, only to reward the system which we rejected.
Parents should not so frequently be on the receiving end of attacks from politicians and members of the teachers union. We are free to choose, but these people want to remove choice... as seen a lot lately with Covid-19 mishandlings. Families are supposed to juggle screen school whether they like it, or not and whether they have a device , or not. Nonsense!
Back to the encounter. I spoke in length about the board member's hypocrisy in choosing a magnet school for her kids, while at the same time fighting against school choice for other families.
A magnet school is a school of choice, but I don't think she was aware of this. A magnet school, while it is a government-run school, it is an application school which a child may attend while avoiding the neighborhood school (for whatever reasons; dislike, low performance, bullying, lacking in-person instruction). Parents apply and the system is the great decider. That's right! They pick and choose who gets to attend. Not all can attend, there's a selection process and there are trade offs, just like when choosing any school, or anything in life for that matter. One large trade off might be the family commits to drive the child to the magnet school -which may happen to be a long way across town- to acquire what they feel is a better K-12 education.
She tells large groups her repetitive message: "families who choose charter schools are segregationists." Calling parents racist is unacceptable. Calling families who choose a better-suited school, "segregationists," is unacceptable and inflammatory. It's one of the reasons I decided to do something about all this chicanery.
What should we call a school board member that wants to trap kids in a box, take their families money and give them nothing in exchange? Call them typical "politicians," and I'm not saying they all have bad intentions, but at some point I expect scales to fall off the eyes of the masses and people will finally start to have a sense of awareness that disrupting the monopoly must occur to fix K-12 education.