Don't tear down our local public schools to help the rich
Please ask our local legislators to oppose HB 823/SB 406, Choose Your School, Choose Your Future. This law would devastate our local public school system by depriving it of almost 1.8 million dollars of funding in just the first year. It does this via the vouchers it proposes to make available, without income limits, to parents who send their children to private schools. The fixed costs of maintaining, heating, cooling, and administering our local school system will stay the same. That means that the per-pupil services can only suffer.
I'm not against private schools or even religious private schools. I attended one for two years. It did a great job helping me finish my secondary education.
Here's the point: My folks didn't ask the government for help to send me there. They shouldn't have gotten government help to send me there. It was a religious school. It required attendance at its chapel three times a week, where it conducted services according to the beliefs of those who founded it. There's nothing wrong with that.
What is wrong is spending tax dollars to support private schools when we need to pay public school teachers adequately. To have provided my family with money to send me to a private religious school would have been to give money to that church. That comes too close to establishing religious institutions as a part of our government.
Our government claims to be a republic. It has become a plutocracy because we are now ruled by the rich. This law would move us closer to being governed by the churches of the rich. The whole point many of our ancestors migrated here was to get religious freedom. Let's not abandon that.
Religious education is crucial. It belongs in our homes and our houses of worship. I have taught religious education; it is not a function of government. Teaching religious education is something that members of each place of worship choose to do voluntarily as a part of their service to the Divine. Religious institutions get tax benefits because they are charities. That is sufficient.
Our ancestors knew that freedom of religion was vital to their new government. They knew that just because people of this or that religious belief system thought something was wrong didn't mean there should be a law against it.
Laws ensure domestic tranquility. That is their purpose. Many are mere conventions for safety. Driving on the right-hand side of the road and stopping at stop signs, for example, are legal conventions. Housing codes reduce the danger of fires and the spread of fires.
Other laws are more complex. They seem moral, but our legislators mostly know that violence begets violence. Someone eventually dies if law enforcement officers can't break up bar fights. Feuds can break into civil wars. Laws are, perhaps surprisingly, not to ensure "moral" behavior. We learned that with our attempt to prohibit the use of alcoholic beverages. We recognized the need to abandon the "noble experiment" of prohibition after only thirteen years.
Please, friends and neighbors, don't tear down our local public schools to help the rich send their children to private schools. Please urge Senator Warren Daniels (Warren.Daniel@ncleg.gov) and Representatives Dudley Greene (Dudley.Greene@ncleg.gov) and Jake Johnson (Jake.Johnson@ncleg.gov) to vote against HB 823/SB 406.
Thank you for your time in reading this.
Sincerely,
Kay House
