Government Schools
(Full disclosure: Our two sons attend the private school Caldwell Academy. Though reasonable in cost as private schools go, this is not a small cost to our family, but we feel it is the best investment we can make for our children’s education.)
I strongly believe that if parents in Guilford County were given a choice the vast majority of them would vote for traditional schools that emphasize basic language and math skills, which all people need to develop throughout their lives to be effective communicators and problem solvers. I do not believe most parents favor having their children be used as guinea pigs for the latest trends in public education…trends that are more based on using the public school system as an indoctrination program into the latest fashions of professional public school administrators than on making sure students complete their schooling with acceptable proficiencies in how to read and write and handle basic calculations with numbers.
I do not support forced school choice programs or any other program that seeks to use the public school system as proving ground for driving societal change. I also do not support the No Child Left Behind Act and I would assist any efforts available at the county level to resist implementation of this unconstitutional federal incursion into local schooling management.
Public schooling is at its best when both individual teachers and individual principals (accountable to parents) are the primary agents driving the system. Precious tax dollars provided to the Guilford County school system should be directed towards attracting (and rewarding) highly capable teachers and principals into our area and not used to create administrative bureaucracies and new schools designed to palatial specifications.
I would support infrastructure improvements in the school system but only to the extent that they can be afforded out of accrued tax revenues and that they are not being used to automatically launch new schools in newly developed areas. One of the deciding factors a person should face in moving to a new neighborhood should be the knowledge that the Guildford County school system and its taxpayer base are not obliged to immediately support that person’s decision to move away from established school infrastructure: They may have to wait until the necessary tax revenues have been accrued rather than demanding the rest of the county take out a loan through a bond vote. I believe that a viable option that could be considered to speed the new school process in newly developed areas would be to have private entities construct multi-use buildings that could be used for schools and leased to the county school system.
I would push to see that the current school bond issues become more than enough to support all growth and re-modeling requirements for the next decade. I will not support any additional bond issues for the Guilford County school system during the next four years.
I would support an effort to shrink public school administration in the county to a size more accountable to taxpayers and parents…even if this means dissolving the county- wide system into smaller local districts; each with the same per capita funding.
