Teachers confront lawmakers at 3rd House
ELKHART — Educators are confronting legislators over public school funding and the threat of seeing the U.S. Department of Education gutted.
The Greater Elkhart Chamber of Commerce hosted its March Third House session on Friday. Reps. Joanna King, Doug Miller and Timothy Wesco along with Sens. Blake Doriot and Linda Rogers spoke about bills that are in the works and heard questions from the audience.
Many attendees wanted to know if lawmakers had thought about the consequences of allowing the Department of Education to be dismantled, as President Donald Trump is poised to do. It's something Republicans have been eager to see since the moment the department was created under President Jimmy Carter in 1980, with Ronald Reagan campaigning the same year on destroying the department along with scrapping bilingual education.
Beth Kallimani, a retired teacher of 40 years, said as many as half of her students in Baugo Community Schools received free and reduced lunch. She said she sees it as a moral imperative to meet the needs of disadvantaged students.
'That means that they don't have a lot of money that they can use to spend on vouchers and private schools. Do we ignore them? That's what I'm talking about. Those are the kids that need us,' she said. 'My brother and I became public school teachers because, as followers of Christ, we have to take care of those less fortunate, and those were our kids. ... My question is, how do you meet their needs?'
The legislators did not respond.
Laura Stauffer, an Elkhart High School teacher, warned that demolishing the Department of Education opens the door for the re-segregation of schools. She pointed to the day federal marshals escorted 6-year-old Ruby Bridges past a crowd of protestors screaming racial slurs and into a whites-only New Orleans elementary school in 1960.
White parents pulled their children out of the school and only one teacher remained behind to teach Bridges.
'Abolishing the Department of Education is detrimental to our students across the country,' Stauffer said. 'When we look at ... Ruby Bridges, who had to be escorted into her school by armed guards because the local school board did not want her there, that is what we are facing if we lose the Department of Education.'
The Department of Education investigates complaints of discrimination based on race, immigration status, sex, disability or religion through its Office for Civil Rights. Stauffer said the department is needed to ensure that all schools are held to the same standard.
'We love our Elkhart school board. But not everyone who sits on a school board understands how to teach and how our children learn. If we allow only our school board to decide what and how our students learn, our students are not going to learn,' she said. 'We need the Department of Education to regulate and make sure that all students across Indiana and across the country are being held to the same expectations.'
She asked audience members to raise their hands if they had worked for or attended a public school, or had children who attended, and many of them did. There was also applause after she asked why funding doesn't match the share of the population who go to public school.
'As we know, 90 percent of students attend public schools. Why do we not get 90 percent of the funding? Until we hold private and charter schools to the same expectations as our public schools, our public schools need to be receiving the funding. So please tell me why we think that some of our students are more important than others.'
Wesco responded by pointing out that the Department of Education was formed 20 years after 'the Ruby Bridges situation.'
'These issues can be resolved without the Department of Education,' he said. 'Although I'm not a federal lawmaker, so you can take that up with federal lawmakers. But I wanted to point that out.'
King said she sent her own children to public school but recognizes that it's not a good fit for everyone. She said she believes public schools do receive the share of funding that Stauffer was asking.
'It's important to allow parents to make those decisions,' King said. 'We are all better when we work together for the common good of what the next generation can bring.'
Wesco added that he was homeschooled and felt that children like him were being left out of the conversation.
'I didn't decide not to attend public school, my parents made the decision. Am I not important? Am I not worthy of the same level of support as anyone else? So thank you very much, but we're spending on average of $12,000 a year for educating public school students, and for homeschool students like me they're still getting zero,' he said. 'We're happy with that, but please don't act like we don't exist, we're not important, we don't matter.'
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