I was among a group of sign-carrying citizens who gathered to send a message to Education Secretary DeVos during her visit to Van Wert.
Our message: We are proud of our public schools. I pay my school taxes knowing that VWCS are providing our children with a quality education. I want not one penny of that tax diverted neither to charter schools nor to other for-profit learning centers. I applaud parents who choose to send their children to private schools for religious or other reasons, but I do not want to pay for that choice.
I further believe that the vast majority of Van Wert County residents, who voted heavily for Donald Trump, do not agree with his Secretary of Education’s plan to divert their tax dollars to profit-driven charter schools. Charter schools have nothing to offer the young people in well-functioning public school systems like ours. That is the message our group of “protesters” hoped to communicate to Madame DeVos.
Ohio has been home to the charter school experiment for some time, and it has not yielded good results. Fraud and unaccountability have been the overriding outcome. VWCS alone in this county has had $311,000 deducted from its 2016-2017 state allocations and sent to charter schools. The graduation rate at ECOT (Ohio Connections Academy), one of those charters, is posted by the Ohio Department of Education at 39% while VWCS has a graduation rate of 96%.
I suspect that a majority of Van Wert County taxpaying Republicans, Democrats, and Heartland Patriots do not see this as anything less than an intrusion upon their will by government. Betsy DeVos, please take that message back to Washington.
Al Arnold, Van Wert
