LTE: The Trojan Horse

Editor, Gettysburg Times,

A recent survey of public-school teachers reports 55% have had it and are ready to exit. Surprised? NO! If parents aren’t complaining about home schooling, others are demanding students not wear masks. Then there’s those politicians who call for the removal of books like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ or a ban on vaccination mandates and masks. Who in their right mind wants to repay their educational loans while working in this chaos so skillfully manipulated by politicians?

However, behind the scenes is a slow-moving multi-year project of PA politicians’ intent on demolishing our schools. A state, once proud of its array of local colleges – now almost dismantled — and top-notch research institutions, is now engaged in a deceitful and hazardous scheme of reducing monies for public schools to replace them with charter or online eLearning schools. More broadly, the scheme is part of a clever legislative contrivance espoused by short-sighted ignorant politicians designed to replace government services with poorly conceived and poorly monitored private enterprise projects.

Under the guise of failing schools, PA politicians want to give parents the right to remove their children and apply for ‘scholarships’ to place their child in a private or semi-private school. You might think that instead of acquiescing to the facts, legislators would organize a task force or develop emergency measures to repair these cherished institutions. No, just let them fail and replace them with programs with no oversight and a largess of corporate tax breaks. And now GOP members are considering COLAs for these programs!

It’s distressing to witness the deterioration of our schools. Some will not accept the inevitable. For eight weeks six PA school districts, Association of Small Schools, NAACP-PA and parents have argued their case before the Commonwealth Court demonstrating that the State is failing to uphold its constitutional responsibilities to provide a ‘thorough and efficient’ system of public education. The stories told are embarrassing and abhorrent. Districts are operating with massive deficits; some forced to cut teaching positions; conditions in some classrooms warrant use of closets and washrooms. The per-student disparity between wealthy and poor districts is as high as $4,800 despite the recommendations of the Basic Education Funding Commission.

GOP politicians have constructed a Trojan Horse to infect and annihilate a cherished institution that is critical to our survival as a democracy. Let’s elect intelligent politicians who know a Trojan Horse when they see one.

Tony McNevin,
Gettysburg