Trump’s school choice initiative is empowering Nevada Latinos

As a former preschool teacher and Special Education Assistant, I know from direct experience that bureaucrats should never be trusted with our childrens’ education. As a proud Latina, I’ve also witnessed how a monopolistic education system hurts minorities in particular by forcing students to attend underperforming public schools solely because of where they live. Sadly, Hispanic families who reside in low-income communities with failing schools usually can’t afford to relocate to a better school district or provide their children with private education — a poverty trap that prevents bright kids from getting into good colleges and universities.

President Trump’s groundbreaking school choice programs are empowering Latino families in Nevada to build a brighter future for our children and grandchildren.

“Now is the time to fight for the forgotten child, and that’s what we’re doing with respect to education,” Donald Trump said last year, noting that too many children have been “trapped in failing government schools” because establishment politicians lacked the courage to take on entrenched special interests that oppose school choice.

The President’s diagnosis of the problem is accurate, and his prescription is both bold and promising. One of the Trump administration’s most ambitious proposals is the Education Freedom Scholarships program — an initiative that would allocate a whopping $5 billion toward school choice programs across the country.

For the past three years, Donald Trump has been implementing policies designed to give millions of American students and their parents the freedom to choose high-quality education opportunities, regardless of socio-economic background.

Meanwhile, Democrats claim that higher taxes and more government control over education is the pathway for our children to experience success. This outdated, “one-size-fits-all” approach is a proven failure, and the solution is to get government out of our lives; not empower further interventions with our hard-earned tax dollars. The Democrats’ ideas only benefit the adults in the room — not our children.

President Trump, conversely, believes it is more important to ensure that all children have access to quality education than it is to prop up America’s fundamentally broken public education system with wasteful subsidies and burdensome government mandates.

Early on in his presidency, Donald Trump championed the “Opportunity Scholarship Program” in Washington, D.C., a federally-funded voucher program that has seen enrollment increase by about 50 percent since he took office. In addition, the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 included a provision that allows parents to use tax-free college savings accounts, known as 529 plans, for up to $10,000 in private school tuition per year. Despite this historic reform, Democrats still absurdly claim that tax reform did not benefit working families.

Nevada has its own version of the Opportunity Scholarship program, which allows private entities to donate to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) in exchange for a tax credit. These contributions fund K-12 private school scholarships of up to about $8,000 for low-income students, giving families across the state an affordable alternative to underperforming neighborhood schools.

In total, 44 states offer some form of school choice, and President Trump is working to support those programs through a federal tax credit.

“We believe that every parent should have educational freedom for their children,” President Trump said in December, adding that Education Freedom Scholarships would expand school choice to over one million additional students across the country.

The same philosophy informed the President’s FY 2019 budget request for the Department of Education, which included $1 billion for school choice grants and another $500 million for charter schools.

We’ve learned from long and painful experience that federal intervention is the wrong way to go about fixing our broken public education system. President Trump understands that real socio-economic empowerment starts in the classroom, and he’s working to improve the lives of millions of young Latinos in states like Nevada by ensuring that every child has the opportunity to receive a quality education.