By allowing ads to appear on this site, you support the local businesses who, in turn, support local journalism.
Deals Education Plan
Placeholder Image

Opportunity for every American is a value which we all hope for.

Fairness means we want to create a level playing field so everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

One way to do this is by providing a quality public education for all children.

Unfortunately in Georgia political forces have been undermining this ideal for years.

As we are all aware, some politicians believe that government cannot be trusted and that anything government tries to do could be accomplished better by private enterprises.

For these people they believe that about public education also.

So groups like American Federation of Children, Walton Industries, and ALEC have devised means by which we could slowly do away with public education without the American people noticing what was happening.

It was important to do this because, basically, American's love their neighborhood schools.

Just look at the pride we felt recently when our Dawson County High Schools girls basketball team had an undefeated season.

So these forces began first by telling everyone that our schools were all failing.

Although we do have serious issues in some schools, most of those are in poor urban and rural areas where poverty has a profound influence on our children's success or failure.

Their first step was the development of charter schools, which at first were praised because these smaller schools, with less regulation, could try out new things which could be used in our traditional public schools.

These turned into state and corporate run charter schools where children were chosen to attend based on socioeconomics of their families or race.

Then we developed vouchers (called scholarships in Georgia) where students could be chosen based on those same issues, but also on religion and sexuality.

Then we began paying for home schooling through Georgia Cyber Schools.

Charter school management companies, cyber software companies and the previously mentioned groups love this because they can make profits off our tax dollars.

Gov. Nathan Deal's newest proposal, Opportunity School Districts, modeled after Louisiana's Recovery School Districts are the next step in the plan by some Republicans to do away with public education.

I plan to write in detail about these schools in a future letter.

In the meantime, remember "Opportunity" in Deals' Opportunity School District stands for Opportunity for Charter School Management companies, Educational Software and testing companies to make money off your tax dollars.

Bette Holland, Dawsonville