School Vouchers for Parents: The Cure for What Ails Nevada’s Public Education

(Chuck Muth) – School bureaucrats and union officials are saying today that if school districts have to reduce their budgets by 10 percent, they’d have to lay off 1,000 teachers….which is pure bullsh*t.

There are other ways to cut education’s budget and other non-essential school district employees who could be given pink slips instead of teachers. This is nothing but a transparent attempt to scare taxpayers into opposing much-needed spending reductions in ALL areas of government.

Walt Rulffes, head honcho of the Clark County school district says he’d rather have government employees work fewer days and shorten the number of days kids get to go to school rather than lay off non-essential employees….which would pretty much be anyone not teaching in a classroom, one principal and one janitor.

This propensity to protect government employees from the same kinds of layoffs being suffered by those in the private sector is starting to border on how vampires react to sunlight.

Lynn Warne, the current Nevada teachers union boss, threatens that if any teachers are laid off, class sizes will jump to 40 or 50 students. With all the melodrama of Joan of Arc on the stake, Warne emotes, “How long are we going to continue to cheat our kids out of an education?”

Heck, that’s an easy one. As long as the teachers union continues to block every school choice option that comes down the pike.

You want smaller class sizes? Walk into a 40-student classroom armed with 20 vouchers valued at, say, $5,000 each and offer them to the first 20 parents who agree to take their kid out of the overcrowded classroom and put them in a private school or homeschool them.

Problem solved.

Oh, and as for the BS argument that there aren’t enough private schools out there to accommodate all the parents who would want to take the vouchers and pull their kids from failing government-run schools, let me assure you that the market will fill the need. If you suddenly have hundreds of parents waving $5,000 vouchers in the air, someone will open a classroom in a strip center or business park to accommodate the market demand.

What? You don’t think you can successfully set up a high-quality school in a business park? You think a school has to be a separate building that costs 10 times more to build than a building in the private sector?

Then you’ve obviously never been to the American Heritage Academy on the corner of Patrick Lane and Sandhill in Las Vegas.

By the way, Emily Richmond of the Las Vegas Sun reports this morning that the most-often heard question from the parents of gifted students at Heckethrn Elementary school is, “Which middle school would offer our children the most challenging environment.” Alas, none.

There are no Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) middle schools in Clark County. And there are no school vouchers for the parents of gifted students to send their kids to a non-public school which would offer them a more challenging environment.

Thanks to Democrats in the Legislature and the teachers union, gifted and talented students in Nevada are just screwed.

One final thought: Why is it OK to give parents vouchers to buy food from a private business – food stamps for use at grocery stores – but not OK to give parent vouchers to buy education from private businesses? Inquiring minds wanna know.