Vouchers won’t help solve education woes

School vouchers must be for the well off. Imagine for a minute that you live in a metropolitan area and you work full time. Your child is going to public school. You really don’t like the school and would like to get the child into another school. There are no private schools you can afford even with the $7,000-plus you can take from the public school. There is a good quality public school on the other side of town, but the buses don’t stop anywhere close to your house, so you would have to get up at 5 in the morning and drive your child to the nearest bus stop on the other side of town and drop her off. Then you would have to drive all the way back across town to get to your job at 7:30. Somewhere in there you’re going to need to shower, dress and get some kind of breakfast for the two of you. Your child doesn’t really want to leave the friends she’s made at her school anyway. It just doesn’t seem worth it.

But wait, the wealthy don’t even need school vouchers. Most of the schools near them are good schools to begin with. Their kids are happy with their schools. Why switch? Take Northwest Arkansas for instance. You could switch your child from Fayetteville to Springdale or Rogers, but why would you want to? All three are pretty good school districts and with the new laws put in effect by your Republican legislature, you have more say than ever in what your child is learning and, being a well-off stay-at-home mom, plenty of time to interfere.

Maybe the vouchers are for the well-off living in rural areas. They might have the time to drive their children to a private school, but there are no private schools in the rural area where they live. So they would have to drive to another county. And again, their kids are happy where they are, where they grew up and where they have friends.

So, who are these school vouchers for? Well, as most of the bills being passed by our Republican Legislature, they are just smoke screens created so they can pat themselves on the backs and claim that they are “protecting the children.” If they really wanted to protect the children and create a better learning environment for them, they would pass bills that helped move children out of poverty and into a safe environment where they would have a chance at learning. All the research about schools and learning shows poverty is the No. 1 reason many children struggle in school. Republicans’ school voucher program won’t help with that.

STEVEN TRULOCK Fayetteville