“A parent’s right to choose”
Take a look at this story. It may or may not be familiar to you, but sadly, it is taking place for families in the Commonwealth every single day.
Dylan Owens-Wargo wasn’t enamored, to say the least, with his mom’s plans to send him to Fishburne Military School for eighth grade.
“I told her I was going to run away if she made me go to Fishburne,” said Owens-Wargo, whose mother, Heather Owens, for her part felt she had no choice but to pull Dylan out of the Waynesboro public-school system.
“He had just stopped caring. He either wasn’t doing his homework, or he wasn’t turning it in, trying to be cool like the other kids. I didn’t give him a choice. This was our only option,” said Owens, who was rolling the dice in more ways than one. Because Heather Owens isn’t the archetype for a private-school mom. She is in fact a single mother and small-business owner who takes on extra clients at her Natural Beauty Studios in Downtown Waynesboro to help pay the $15,000 annual expenses for tuition, books and uniforms for Dylan to be able to attend Fishburne.
“It’s really, really hard on me. I take clients sometimes 7 o’clock in the morning, sometimes 10 o’clock at night. Whatever it takes. There are days when I’m not sure how I’m going to accomplish it. But it falls into place,” Owens said.
The VEA- leading the fight against any efforts for to give parents educational choices- wants us to believe that more funding for the existing public school system would have helped Dylan (and all kids for that matter) in his public school. They maintain the position that success can be determined by the amount of taxayer funding spent in a status-quo public school system.
Instead of admitting that some students desperately need a different learning environment, they throw around accusations and make the same argument that the state needs to better fund public schools. (Of course they won’t tell you that because of mandated re-benchmarking every two years they will ALWAYS be able to say that schools aren’t fully funded, but that’s another story…)
How about we focus on simply funding education? Not limiting education simply to the same-old “public school” model. If our commitment to Virginia families is education, why should it matter what form that education takes? Why must it be a one-size-fits-all big-box model?
Chris Graham, Executive Editor of The New Dominion Magazine (and the Augusta Free Press), takes an in-depth look at the debate over school choice in Virginia in “A parent’s right to choose.“ Mr. Graham examines the many issues in the debate- and shares Dylan and his mother’s story about their choice.
He notes, in the comments section:
Honestly, if I had a child getting ready to go to school today, I would do everything I could to avoid the status-quo public-school system in favor of having them in an environment where actual learning was the emphasis.
With 25 percent of American schoolchildren not graduating from high school on time, I say it’s high time for us to try to do something to improve the quality of K-12 education – and now.
We agree. Virginia’s families deserve nothing less.
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