OPINION: Let your representatives know you support education

Are you as furious as I am? You should be. Our legislators came together to pass a carefully crafted compromise on education, passing it with more than 90% of their members voting yes. It did not deliver as much funding as I and many others believe is needed for our school systems, nor did it deliver on all the controls and boosts to charter and private schools that the governor wanted. But it was a compromise, and that’s what you get — something for everyone, but not everything you want.

Gov. Dunleavy has called himself the “education governor,” but has proven to be anything but that. That carefully crafted bill included everything that nearly all our legislators could both agree on and agree to give up, all for the future of our children. Yet the governor wasn’t willing to give up anything he wanted and because of that, he vetoed the entire bill. This on top of vetoing half the one-year funding increase for education that the Legislature approved last year. All following upon his trashing our university system by cutting their state funding by 40% a few years ago.

I hope people will look at the facts to understand that you can’t improve our education outcomes when the system has been squeezed for so many years. Classes are much bigger than they were 10 or 15 years ago; we’ve had to pay for far too many security measures because guns are rampant in our society and there have been far too many school shootings; health care costs have increased tremendously, affecting the uncontrollable expenditures related to staffing; and our school facilities are older and require maintenance above annual maintenance needs. We certainly don’t want any school roofs falling on our children when we’re faced with unusually heavy snow years.

Let’s fund our education system and give our kids the quality education they deserve. They’re our future and we need a well-educated one to tackle the problems they’ll face. Please join me in writing to your legislators, and all our legislators, to swiftly overturn the governor’s veto of their education bill, SB 140. Remember any of those who don’t and make sure they don’t get your vote in the upcoming election.

Ann Rappoport is a public education supporter and a retired field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She lives in Anchorage.

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