Arkansas School Vouchers
A Real Life Enactment of A Modest Proposal
Yesterday I had to go to the Evil Corporate Empire, Hobby Lobby. I rarely go there, but we were making ornaments with a nonprofit organization and they pretty much have a corner on the market. Their organization is discriminatory towards women’s health care and LGBTQ+ and I don’t like to give them my money.
As I was standing in the checkout line, the woman in front of me started up a conversation. She shared that her husband was a Villines from Newton County and that she was a teacher at a rural public school in Huntsville. She was in Hobby Lobby buying teaching supplies for her classroom with her own money but assured me that the parents would most likely chip in to help cover the costs.
This alone is horrifying. Teachers in Arkansas, for as long as I have been a parent, have had to pay for supplies on their own, or ask parents to provide. The school budgets are not adequate to cover these costs.
As we stood there in the long line, waiting our turn, I asked her how she felt, knowing that home-schooled and private schooled kids could now use school vouchers (taxpayer dollars) from the LEARNS Act to pay for horse riding lessons.
She said she hadn’t heard that before. Actually, she said, she hadn’t heard of the LEARNS Act. She said she was too busy teaching and keeping up with life in Huntsville to pay attention to the news.
I told her about my concerns for rural schools like Jasper and Huntsville and whether they would be able to survive losing public school money to private, religious, and home schools. I told her that each student in Arkansas was now entitled to roughly $7,000 in vouchers, basically incentivizing homeschooling for poor people or subsidizing private schools for rich people. She looked shocked but maintained that she had not heard about LEARNs Act vouchers.
This is a far cry from when I was a kid living with my parents in Possum Trot, Carroll County in the early ‘80s, home-schooling with a plan to run out the back fields to the neighbor’s house if the Department of Human Services came after us because our neighbor kept threatening to call them on us for home-schooling.
Our conversation in the line at Hobby Lobby turned to the Newton County Quorum Court Judge when we both ended up shaking our heads. Then I watched this Villines woman pay for her public school teaching supplies and thought how ironic this situation was.
Y’all, I know it is hard just surviving. I know that work can suck the life out of you. I know that it is hard listening to the local news and making the time to read the paper, but it is SOOOOO important. If we are not paying attention, our legislators are happy to make these decisions without us. If we are not showing up and asking them why our teachers have to pay for public school teaching supplies out of their own pockets while home-schoolers and rich, private school, city kids get to take horse riding lessons on the tax-payers’ dime, then we have no hope of creating a government that is of the people, by the people, or for the people.
Listen to your local NPR Station. Pay for a newspaper subscription from a reliable source. Stay informed.
Learn about the State House, Arkansas Senate, Arkansas Supreme Court, county, and city websites. Spend a little time on those weekly to keep up with legislation that you care about. My county and city sites will not be the same as yours.
Meet your representatives. If you don’t know who they are, look them up on Voter View Arkansas. Follow their newsletters. Attend their events. If they’re doing their job, they should be accessible.
Write letters, write emails, and call your representatives. Tell them how you feel about watching rural teachers spending their pittance of a paycheck on supplies to teach our kids when they are voting for a voucher system that is subsidizing private education for the upper class.
We can’t just sit idly by and let them get away with this shit. We can make it better. But we have to be engaged in our democracy to make it better. As it is, we are living through a real-life version of A Modest Proposal.
Come on, Arkansas! We deserve better.
My parents were both public school teachers. I remember many times we did not have enough money to be clothe, hand me downs never really fit well after a certain age, yet my parents would have to purchase school supplies for their classrooms. I remember the pressure in the home during those end of the summer blues when there was barely enough…that was a long time ago. I’m disappointed with the most recent actions of our government and sneaky ballots, very confusing wording, many most likely did not know what they were actually voting on. Smokey mirrors and frazzled times. Thank you for sharing.