Of the many culture shocks I experienced moving from Ohio to the remote eastern Kentucky county of around 10,000 people my grandmother’s family calls home, none was greater than the stark contrast in schools. The district I grew up in, just outside of the Dayton city limits, was by no means wealthy. Still, the high school had a thriving foreign language department, an excellent drama program – I made the International Thespian Society my freshman year, which is quite the feat – and plenty of other extracurriculars. The school I attended for fifth and sixth grade was, it proudly boasted, named a National School of Excellence.
This was not the case at Leslie County High School. Guidance counselors had to write a note to go along with my college applications, explaining I could not fulfill the foreign language requirements because we didn’t have a foreign language teacher. There was no drama program, so my dreams of being an actor ended. If the schools were recognized nationally, it was for their abysmal performance.
In 2009, five years after I graduated, Leslie County High School was one of the lowest-performing high schools in the state. But since then, they’ve been transformed. Leslie County schools have been held up as a case study in how rural schools can rebound from academic emergency to academic excellence, with then-principal Kevin Gay being spotlighted for his leadership by the Obama White House.
What made the difference? A lot of it had to do with money: a grant from Berea College, federal funds, and help from federal programs like Teach for America and AmeriCorps. And other schools in similar positions could experience success with more funding, too. But on November 5, Kentuckians will vote on an amendment which would do the opposite.
Amendment 2, a proposed constitutional amendment “would reallocate some taxpayer dollars from public schools into private or charter schools,” WHAS-11 in Louisville reports. Passage of Amendment 2 would be a colossal mistake for the Commonwealth and its children. This is especially true in rural schools like the one I graduated from where the tax base is weak, private and charter schools are nonexistent.
The only thing standing between poor rural kids and upward mobility is opportunity. We aren’t less clever in Appalachia. We just don’t have the same resources. And now, as former Kentucky Representative Jim Wayne wrote in the Louisville Courier Journal, “this constitutional amendment will permit the misguided Republican legislators to suck hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s coffers to subsidize private schools that serve a select group of students.”
You best believe that select group doesn’t include your Appalachian kids. You don’t have to take Wayne, an urban Democrat’s, word for it either.
Earlier this year ProPublica profiled Republicans in Tennessee who are fighting against the so-called “school choice” initiatives embraced by many in that party. “Ninety-five percent of our students, our future business owners, our future leaders, are going to public schools,” Republican state legislator Todd Warner said. “They’re not going to private. Why take it away from them?”
Rural Republican legislators know this because rural educators are telling them. “It’ll hurt us financially. I mean, it will,” Principal Janet Throgmorton of Graves County High School in Mayfield, Kentucky, told the Kentucky Lantern of Amendment 2. “They’re not thinking about a school district that travels thousands and thousands of miles because our county is so large and rural.”
This massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the rural to the urban and suburban centers of the Golden Triangle – that region of Kentucky bounded by Lexington, Louisville, and the suburbs of Cincinnati where most of the state’s wealth has always been concentrated – will be a disaster for public schools like those in Graves and Leslie counties. Research by the Economic Policy Institute finds that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes and may actually worsen them. Furthermore, the EPI finds that “wealthy families are overwhelmingly the recipients of school voucher tax credits.”
As these vouchers usually don’t cover the full tuition, even those who do have easy access to private schools can’t often afford to send their kids there. Furthermore, the National Rural Education Association found that “it’s mostly wealthy families already enrolled in private schools” who benefit from vouchers. In states with universal voucher schemes like Kentucky Republicans want to adopt, 60% of voucher funding goes to families in districts with the highest incomes, where the most public schools exist. This tracks with findings from the National Coalition for Public Education, which finds most voucher recipients never even attended public schools to begin with – meaning taxpayers are subsidizing rich kids’ private education, not sending their own kids to private schools.
We often talk about Appalachians voting against their own interest, and I hate that kind of talk because the reality is usually so much more complicated. Not so here. Kentucky’s Amendment 2 is not in Appalachia’s interest. It is not in rural Kentucky’s interest. Voting for Amendment 2 is voting to take money from your kids and their schools and give it to rich people in the Golden Triangle so they can send their kids to fancy private schools you’ll never be able to afford even with the vouchers.
The better way forward is to do what was done in Leslie County: more money into public schools, not less.
Earlier this year, I returned to my high school for the first time since graduation. The changes astounded me. The school was cleaner, brighter, more vibrant. Teachers who taught me gushed about how much has improved, not just in aesthetics but in academics. When I went back for my twentieth high school reunion, I caught up with classmates who went on to be doctors and nurses, soldiers and state troopers. I won an award for “most unusual career” as a freelance writer, but in truth all of us who were there deserved an award. The deck was stacked against us, but we made it. We found a way.
What of the kids who didn’t, though? Out of a class of about 130, only about 25 of us turned up for the reunion. Looking at a table of our deceased classmates, and thinking about those who weren’t there (including some in jail), I realized how lucky we were.
It’s unfair that Republicans in Kentucky now want to take money away from rural schools like ours and give it to rich people so they can send their kids to fancy charter schools and private academies in Lexington and Louisville. No rural kids will ever have that opportunity because no one is rushing to open charter schools in places like Leslie County. Recruiting teachers to the public school is hard enough!
I am proud of the progress my alma mater has made. I am proud of the teachers who give their all so that kids in eastern Kentucky can have a fighting chance in life by ensuring they receive the best education they can given the measly resources they have. They are doing God’s work.
School vouchers are a waste of taxpayer money that take from the poor and give to the rich. A better use of state coffers would be funding schools like Leslie County High School, where money met motivation to raise standards and outcomes. That is what needs to happen.
Voting for Amendment 2 is voting against your child’s future. Instead, I encourage every single Kentuckian to vote against this radical redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich and instead demand your leaders start funding your local public schools the way you and your kids deserve them to be funded.
Kentucky schools can be the best in the nation. Amendment 2 will ensure they never are.
Skylar Baker-Jordan is 100 Days in Appalachia’s Contributing Editor for Community Engagement. Support his work and our continued coverage of politics in the region by donating here.