Even though a legislative effort to expand school choice in Alabama failed to pass during last legislative session, some Republicans have indicated that they will continue to advocate for it in the future.
State Rep. Charlotte Meadows (R-Montgomery), the main sponsor of the school choice bill in the Alabama House of Representatives last session, believes that in order for school choice to ever cross the finish line, it will be up to parents to get involved.
Tuesday, on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program,” Meadows called on parents to lobby lawmakers for more school choice options in the Yellowhammer State.
“I believe if parents were to start making real demands that their legislators pay attention to school choice legislation, the legislators wouldn’t have another choice,” asserted Meadows. “It’s an election year, some people are still up for decision in November. My race actually is too. I would hope that parents who care about this as an issue for them would get involved and tell their legislators, as they’re out meeting them on the campaign trail, that they really want this to happen.”
The lawmaker noted that everyone in the legislature tends to agree that a real problem exists with public schools in the state, which she believes is a good starting point.
“[T]here is a universal understanding and statement that our education is not where we want it to be in Alabama,” she explained. “Across the aisle, the Democrats said the same thing that Republicans did. We’re not getting what we’re paying for. We got an education system that’s not providing every child with the education they need or deserve.”
Meadows admitted that the disagreements are over the potential solutions to the problems.
“We’ve finally gotten to the point where everybody’s kind of rowing in the same direction saying, ‘Something’s not working and we need to make some changes.’ Now we’re not rowing in the same direction in terms of what those changes should be.”
She also believes that many of the arguments against expanding school choice in Alabama are based on attempts to preserve the current system rather than doing what is best for individual students.
“The biggest criticism is that we’re taking money away from public schools that are already underfunded,” she noted. “I would beg to differ that they’re underfunded because we’ve got the biggest budget and we’ve got more money in education in Alabama than we’ve ever had … But that’s really not the point. The point is that the money is the taxpayers’ dollars and it’s sent from the taxpayers to the state to educate the children. It’s not being sent to the state to fund the system. So we’ve got to get it out of our mind that that’s what the money is for is to pay for a system that may or may not be working for all students.”
Meadows reiterated her call to parents that she will need their help to eventually accomplish expanding school choice for the citizenry.
“[W]e had the Parent’s Choice Act this past year that didn’t go very far,” she said. “But I know that I’m going to work to bring that back against next year, and it would be great if I had 100,000 parents calling their legislators saying, ‘Please pay attention to this and get it going.’”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
