Despite denial by overpaid school superintendents and the Vermont Department of Education, Vermont’s public school system is declining rapidly. Students are leaving while yet more staff are hired; test scores are sinking while agitation over race, gender, climate, and other social issues are all being inflamed; parents who homeschool are treated with hostility; schools were merged and closed under Act 46 despite community opposition and promises to the contrary; the bungling od masks and vaccinations during COVID revealed kids took second place over the fears of bureaucrats.
The most important vehicle for parents of any political or spiritual background to oversee the nurturing education of their children is school choice. As more Vermonters understandably lose confidence and trust in the politically-weaponized public school system, or simply want to protect their children form gender conditioning or racist ‘theories” (that we are told are not used but are), they are compelled by this crushing state bureaucracy to then pay for private school while still paying for public school through taxes. Imagine if Vermont commanded that all parents pay for universal daycare, even if they are raising their own kids at home – this is exactly the double taxation that Vermont’s government routinely imposes on poor Vermonters.
Universal daycare is inequitable, just as Vermont’s lack of charter schools is inequitable. Offering students income-sensitive subsidies for alternative schools would be equitable. It would cease compelling parents of young children to pay twice for the liberty to educate their children. The fact that Vermont’s government is now using schools to compel indoctrination in anti-Christian, anti-Constitutional, anti-Vermont, anti-American, anti-white, hatred, makes paying for that offense even more insulting. But this is why Progressives will fight tooth and nail to prevent parents having freedom – they WANT to punish anyone who demurs from their hate ideology and cult, and the more they flog our children with their pernicious brainwashing, the more totalitarian they will become to prevent resistance.
School choice is a basic fundamental right for Vermont parents. Schools now insist that they hold the power to overrule parents on conditioning of children: they have failed both parents and teachers. Those who want to teach their 5-year-old that they can watch pornography and select genders from a rainbow are free to do so, but they are not free to compel the rest of us to inflict such harms on our children, OR to pay for it. The progressives do not have to pay for charter schools: why should those paying for charter schools have to fund their Vermont-hating abuse of law and civility?
Additionally, parents in Vermont whose children remain in public schools must be respected, and this filthy social justice “theory” that has politically charged our schools must be removed. At a minimum, parental opinions and involvement in all matters of their children’s education must be reaffirmed and assured. Parents must have access to curricula, and teachers and administrations must affirm that they are servants, not rulers, over citizens’ children.