Public school parent and professor Atira Charles advocates for school choice in a legislative panel.
Testimony from parents and other "citizen lobbyists" can have an impact on legislative debates in Tallahassee. Last week, several parents showed up in the state capital to support public school legislation.
The testimony from these two parents sheds some light on the reasons people take advantage of school choice, and the barriers they sometimes overcome. We present their remarks here, edited for length and lightly for clarity.
George Farrell, father of a second-grader at Plato Academy in Pinellas County, addressing the House Education Appropriations Subcommittee in support the Florida Charter School Alliance:
For me, you only get one chance to educate your child. You get one shot. And if you miss that shot, you've got a problem down the road. I'm very, very passionate about educating my son. He's a little active, as boys can be, and I make a sacrifice of not putting him on a bus, but driving him every day, and picking him up. It makes a sacrifice to my income, and a lot of charter school parents make that same sacrifice. It's tough, because it impacts your job, and your career, but it's my son, and he's my next generation.
Atira Charles, Florida A&M University professor, addressing the Senate Education Appropriations Subcommittee, speaking as a Leon County Schools parent:
I have found that when we start having the conversation about parental choice, there are different types of students that have different experiences.
As an educator, professor, business owner, I had the option with my children to put them in private school, public school. We had different options.
The challenge I found was that my daughter was a gifted child. When we had her in preschool and had her in an early-childhood private school, and the school ended at the third grade, she was a seven-year-old who was testing into the fourth grade. So she was in the category of being a gifted and exceptional child. As we started to look for options for her in the city, we found that there weren't a lot of gifted options that met the expectations that we felt would push her educational advancement the way we wanted it to go.
Luckily, in my ZIP code, we had a school that this year created a third-fourth grade gifted combo class. But that's the only full, 100-percent-gifted class for third and fourth grade in the whole city, and if I was not in the ZIP code to be able to have my daughter in that class, I would been in a situation where I would have felt like I had the right as a taxpayer to be able to have my child take that class.
So when we think about what it means for parents to have choice, it isn't always from the deficit model, that a kid doesn't have, and needs to go to another option so that they can get baseline, or standard, or status-quo opportunitiy. There are children who are exceptional, and have a surplus model, where there are certain environments that can take them above where they are.
As we make these decisions, I just want us to be clear that every student, every family, every parent, is not a homogenous group, and that there are different types of journeys and paths that still create a situation where everyone deserves the right to have to parental choice...
... All parents are created equal, and should have the opportunity to choose where their children go to school.
