I’m a relative newcomer to Cabarrus County, and one of the things that stuck me as unusual was that Cabarrus county does not allow parents any say in what schools their children attend.
My wife and I live very close to the Pitts School Road Elementary School, and we are forunate, because we really like it a lot. In fact, it’s one of the reasons we bought our house in the location we did.
However, most people do not realistically have the ability to move just to get their children into a good school. For parents who are financially blessed, they can afford to choose a private school, and if you are lucky enough to win the enrollment lottery, you may be able to send a child to a Charter school… But for the vast majority of parents, these are not options, and buying a house near a better school is not an option either.
If other counties can work on a School Choice plan, that empowers parents to choose what’s best for their children, why can’t Cabarrus county do the same?
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6 responses so far ↓
1 Caleb Seamone // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:11 am
I know next to nothing about how school choice works, but it sounds like if parents could pick which school their child attended, some schools might not get picked hardly at all, and then would get dubbed “bad schools”. Also, would we have to pay for busing a kid all the way across town because they like one school better than the other? Sounds like more money out of my pocket, but like I said, I really don’t know anything about how this works
2 Tony Hooker // Apr 25, 2008 at 2:53 am
Well, you have the cause and effect backwards there. They wouldn’t be dubbed bad schools because no parents picked them… Parents would avoid them because they are bad schools.
Look at housing prices around high performing schools vs. around low performing schools. Right now, an address change is the only school choice parents have available, and it housing prices are closely tied to how good the local school is.
3 Justin Thibault // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Tony - My brief experience with private schools left me a bit underwhelmed. This area has solid schools; but they could use some improvement. I don’t think the way to improve them is by Balkanizing them through vouchers or hope that Charter school experiments will start panning out. For example, if we hadn’t been so obsessed with Coy’s trysts - we’d be talking about the embezzlement scandal at a local charter school.
I’m not opposed to charter schools or vouchers; and I think those should be options in some cases. However, I think the first step is to get the entire community (not just parents) recognizing the stake in our schools.
4 Steve Smith // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Tony
There are two (2) County Commission Candidates (Liz Poole and Holly Blackwelder) who set on the School Board. There is a good chance that one or both may end up on the County Commission. Along with Grace Mynatt who used to set on the School Board, you might ask them that question and see what their answer might be. Our single largest expenditure is on the County School System. I would hope that a school choice plan would not increase that expenditure. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system is trying to operate a limited school choice plan over there but with minimal success.
5 Aaron // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Good one Caleb, but the award goes to Justin because he did the NCGOP thing and used the 6 degrees of seperation to link two unrelated subjects together.
Here are a few links to some posts I’ve done on the subject that were rather well researched… This is from my “Holly Hobby, I want to be a reporter when I grow up” phase…
http://www.braincelldestroyer.com/2007/08/little-jonny-cant-read-but-not-to-worry.html
http://www.braincelldestroyer.com/2007/08/little-jonny-cant-read-w-and-teddy.html
http://www.braincelldestroyer.com/2007/08/little-jonny-cant-read-we-just-need.html
For the purposes of this discussion I would suggest reading the post from the bottom link first as it directly deals with what we’re talking about.
Here’s the question: Would you support a system in which any parent could send their child to any school in the county if they were willing to transport them there themselves and not using bussing at all??
Justin-You’ve got a good point. I’ve followed Carolina International School rather closely and it is a good story. But we can’t give too much attention to it. After all, we’ve had the Savings and Loan Scandal, The Check Bouncing Scandal, Watergate, Monica Gate and the Iran Contra Affair. All of which were government funded and government handled and all of them cost us millions. Not to mention the entire presidency of Jimmy Carter…
6 Cabarrus Cheap Seats // Apr 26, 2008 at 7:06 pm
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